


not in this world (or the next)

by estel_willow



Series: not in this world (or the next) [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, M/M, Parallel Universes, alien tech, alternate universe major character death (not on screen), handwavey science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-05-20 10:14:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 57,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19374637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estel_willow/pseuds/estel_willow
Summary: It isn’t until he realises he can’t find the keys for his fucking truck anywhere and that there’s mail on the table addressed to Mr M Evans that Noah called him ‘Evans’, too. He fumbles inside the wallet that he’d managed to locate and pulls out a New Mexico licence with his picture on it; he doesn’t have a black eye and a split lip in this one, his hair’s tamed and he doesn’t look like he’s gone three days without showering. His date of birth is stamped, clear and correct, but then where his name should read ‘Michael Guerin’, it reads “Michael Evans’ and the address registered on the license is that of Max and Isobel’s childhood home. Noah had also said ‘your mom’s’. Not ‘Mrs Evans’.It feels like a bucket of ice water’s dumped over his head as he finally accepts that something is very, very wrong.(aka, the fic spawned from a tumblr prompt about Michael waking up in a parallel reality.)





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> So this got wildly out of control. This comes from a tumblr prompt by pastelwitchling ([here](https://pastelwitchling.tumblr.com/post/185837232799/hey-im-in-a-good-mood-so-i-want-to-ruin-yours)). 
> 
> Thank you to [Lire-Casander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lire_Casander/pseuds/Lire_Casander/works?fandom_id=29002712), [Beamirang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beamirang/pseuds/beamirang/works?fandom_id=29002712) and [InsidiousIntent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsidiousIntent/pseuds/InsidiousIntent) for hand-holding and cheerleading. The latter two also made this infinitely more painful than I had originally planned, so blame them. :D
> 
> Unbeta'd.

The first thing Michael notices is that his hand doesn’t hurt. As he stretches his arms above his head and his fingers knock into the headboard of a proper bed, he realises that he’s not in his Airstream. When he blinks awake, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with increasing urgency as he realises that there’s no trace of a hangover to reassure him that’s the reason he’s waking up in a bed he doesn’t know with no knowledge of how he got there, he sees simple decor around him in with splashes that look like Isobel’s handiwork. 

It isn’t a place he recognises, and since the other half of the bed is cold - meaning he didn’t have a partner last night - and the shower isn’t running, Michael’s alone in a strange house. His sensation of sheer what-the-fuckery is only exacerbated when he closes his eyes again and reaches out for Isobel, the presence warm and constant in the back of his mind, to find that she’s not there. That panics him more than waking up somewhere strange, so much so that when he grabs for his phone on the nightstand he doesn’t notice that it's plugged into the wall via a cord that looks well-loved and well used. He scrolls blindly through the contacts until he finds her name and it takes an agonising thirty seconds for her to pick up the phone. 

“Mikey,” she tells him, her voice sleepy and sharp, “the world had better be actually ending otherwise I’ll murder you later at lunch.”

Michael’s too stunned by her calling him _Mikey_ that he stills for a moment, staring ahead dumbly and waiting for his brain - he’s a genius, right? - to catch up with him.

“Michael?” Concern filters down the line, then, because he hasn’t replied to her. He hears the sound of covers rustling and her hushing someone behind her, a voice that sounds like Noah and Michael’s blood runs cold. “Michael, what’s going on?”

“Is that Noah?” he asks. 

Isobel laughs, a little uncertain and confused, “Of course it is, dummy,” she replies, warm affection in her voice, “who else is it going to be, Valenti?” 

He hears her protesting a little and the sound of a faint scuffle, punctuated by a playful _get off, Noah- give that back_ before that voice, that voice that makes his veins freeze, says, “Evans, it’s six am on a Saturday and I’ve been working immigration cases for a month. This is the start of my two-week vacation and if the world isn’t actually on fire over there I’m not gonna stop Izzy stabbing you with a fork at your mom’s.”

“Mikey? Are you- are you sure you’re okay?” Isobel’s wrangled the phone back off her husband and Michael’s already on his feet, looking around for clothes that don’t feel right against his skin as he slides into jeans that are of better quality than he’s ever owned in his life and boots that fit him like a second skin without needing to be stretched and softened with a spoon. 

“Yeah,” Isobel replies, “I’m fine. Worried about you, though, what’s going on? Noah- Noah stop it.”

“Evans just leave me to a morning with my wife. You’ll get to have her later.” Noah’s voice is distant and Isobel’s chiding response sounds like she’s smiling and not at all worried that a _mind-controlling, alien serial killer who is supposed to be fucking dead in the desert is in her bed again_. 

“Tell your husband not to call me Evans,” Michael retorts and the smile disappears from Isobel’s voice, the light laughter from whatever Noah was doing to her dying in an instant. “I’ll be over in half an hour.”

He hangs up to the sound of her protesting. 

He has to save her.

It isn’t until he realises he can’t find the keys for his fucking truck anywhere and that there’s mail on the table addressed to Mr M Evans that Noah called him ‘Evans’, too. He fumbles inside the wallet that he’d managed to locate and pulls out a New Mexico licence with his picture on it; he doesn’t have a black eye and a split lip in this one, his hair’s tamed and he doesn’t look like he’s gone three days without showering. His date of birth is stamped, clear and correct, but then where his name should read ‘Michael Guerin’, it reads “Michael Evans’ and the address registered on the license is that of Max and Isobel’s childhood home. Noah had also said ‘your mom’s’. Not ‘Mrs Evans’. 

It feels like a bucket of ice water’s dumped over his head as he finally accepts that something is very, very wrong.

***

Roswell’s the same. Or, at least, it feels the same. The air has that slightly stale taste to it that he’s grown fond of over the years. It feels familiar, the way it cloys at the back of his throat. His shoes are too comfortable and his clothes feel too nice but the streets have the same layout and the cracks in the pavement are the same. The Crashdown looks different but only in that there’s fresh paint on the sign and Rosa Ortecho bouncing a little girl on her hip.

Michael stumbles over a crack in the pavement he’s known about since he was twelve.

Rosa Ortecho. 

She isn’t nineteen, she doesn’t look fucking nineteen. For the briefest of moments, Isobel vanishes from his mind because he can see Rosa fucking Ortecho in the Crashdown looking, well, looking older than the nineteen years she had looked two days ago when he’d surfaced from the bunker under his airstream for food and oxygen. 

He files it away in a folder he’s labelling _things to deal with after I save my sister from a psychopath_. 

Adjusting the hat on his head, he picks up the pace again. Isobel first. Rosa later.

***

It’s just over half an hour by the time his fist starts smacking on the delicately painted door of Isobel’s house. She pulls it open, dressed in a deep blue silk dressing gown and grey sweatpants. He hopes to fuck she has a tank top on underneath. He realises that he must look wild when she lays eyes on him and her expression shifts, her eyes widen and her face crumples and then she reaches out for him at the same time as he steps forward to pull her into his arms.

He can’t feel the way their minds lock together whenever they’re touching and it worries him. HIs hand cups the back of her head, the other wrapped around her waist and hers are around his shoulders. She feels strong and steady, there’s no fragility in the way she folds against him. It worries him almost more than the lack of connection in the way that she presses close and pushes her fingers through his hair like she’s _comforting_ him.

“Noah’s left to get coffee,” she told him, leaning back and cupping his face. Her expression is soft and apologetic. “We didn’t realise what the date was,” she added, her voice gentle like he’s going to break at any given second. “I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier.” 

“What?” Michael asks, pulling back from where her thumbs are brushing reassuring strokes across his cheekbones. She lets her touch drop, but it’s quickly replaced by Michael curling his fingers around her elbow. “Look- I- This is _wrong_ , Iz, and I need you to- We need to go out to the Turquoise mines with Max. Where is he? I couldn’t get hold of him.” 

Isobel presses her lips together. “Max is on a press tour,” she says, frowning a little. Her hand lifts again and brushes the back of it over his forehead. Her touch lingers like she’s checking his temperature. “You dropped him off at the airport last week even though he didn’t want to leave. He said he’d cancel.” Worry lines appear on her forehead as it creases upwards. 

Michael shakes his head, he’s got no fucking idea what’s going on but he has to get Isobel out of the house before Noah gets back. Before he sees that psychopath and throws him through the nearest window. He feels his powers licking underneath his skin, restless as a caged panther. He swallows, breathes in sharply through his nose to control it. “We just- can we go somewhere else? Please?” He has to get her away. He has to ask her about Rosa and the little girl that was bouncing on her hip in the Crashdown. He has to ask her about why he can’t feel her anymore and how Noah came back from the fucking dead.

He expects her to argue, but she just nods her head once. “Of course,” she says, that careful tone in her voice again. There’s a worry there - Michael hesitates to say ‘fear’ because she’s not afraid of him but she looks like she might be afraid _for_ him - and Michael doesn’t understand at all. “Just- let me get dressed and text Noah.” 

“I don’t want him to come.”

“I gathered,” Isobel responds, not unkindly. “But there’s no point in him getting breakfast for us if we won’t be here. So I’ll tell him that we’ll be back later. He’ll understand.” 

She disappears and he hears her speaking softly into the phone. He tips his head and leans against the wall, listening intently. 

“No, Noah- I don’t think- No, you didn’t upset him. He’s just- this week’s going to be hard on him. I think it’ll be- yeah, harder than last year. I’ve got him. Just… I’ll make it up to you after lunch. I love you, too. See you at mom’s.” 

When she re-appears, Michael’s made himself busy looking at a photo album that he doesn’t recognise. There are pictures of the three of them - Max, Isobel and him - when they were younger. Things Michael knows for sure he never experienced; holidays with the Evanses, camping under the stars while he sits tucked underneath Anne’s arm and she presses a kiss to the top of his head, wearing Mickey ears at Disney even though he and Max both look like they hate it. Picnics with Liz, Rosa, Maria and- and _Alex_. His fingers brush over a young Alex Manes who looks bright and happy. Even as a teenager - in some of the later pictures, images of them being caught staring at each other like there was no one else in the world - Alex is radiant. He was radiant. He doesn’t have the eyeliner or the nose ring in these photos, but he doesn’t have ghosts around him either, he doesn’t have the weight of everything horrible in the world that had happened to him.

He’s leaving almost manically through memories he doesn’t have when Isobel’s fingers close around his, slamming the photo album shut just as he sees Max and Liz’s wedding. He hadn’t gotten far enough to see what Alex looked like in a sharp suit - because of course Alex would have been there - and he makes a sharp sound of protest that dies on his lips when he sees tears on the edges of Isobel’s eyelashes.

“I don’t think- Maybe not today?” 

Realising that if he’s going to find out what’s happening the smartest thing is just to agree - for now - Michael nods his head. “Sure,” he says after a moment, wetting his lower lip and feeling a familiar sense of relief when the tension drains a little out of Isobel’s watery smile. That was the right answer. “Can we- can we go now?” 

She nods, grabs her keys and leads the way, locking up after herself and indicating that Michael climbs into the passenger side of her car. He doesn’t think it’ll take them out to the mines the way he would normally go, but there’s a dirt road that goes almost all the way there so he directs her quietly. He doesn’t ignore the way her knuckles are white around the steering wheel but he doesn’t know how to ask her and feels like if he does she might break and he doesn’t- he can’t handle that. Not when she looks more together than he’s seen in years. 

He’s always thought of Isobel as strong, though there’s been a part of her that shattered a long time ago. For the most part, she’s been a fierce warrior, indomitable and together and perfect. She’s always blazed in front of him but Michael’s seen the cracks, gotten good at spotting when the weaknesses show, when the fear creeps in. It’s in the way her eyes restlessly dart around, never still, in the way she twists her rings or flings her hands around when she talks. It’s in the paper-thin edges of her smile, the edges of her expression that break and shatter a little bit when she thinks no one but Michael’s looking. He can’t see any of that in her now, it’s like the part of her that died in the desert that night never fled from her, stolen by dirtied hands.

Still, whenever she looks at him that fragility reappears. He doesn’t think it’s for her, though. She’s watching him out of the corner of her eye like he might fracture and shatter into a thousand pieces any minute and he really doesn’t understand why. But then, apparently Max has fucked off out of Roswell and Noah’s still alive and Rosa has… a little person. And he lives in a fucking house. Or, Michael _Evans_ lives in a house. Frustration bubbles inside of him and he just breathes, in through his nose and out through his mouth, flexing his fingers restlessly against his thigh and trying to understand why the constant ache of his healed hand has gone. 

It’s one more fucking question in an already overflowing bucket and he doesn’t even know how to begin sorting through the shit. 

“Turn up here,” he says, waving his hand to signal the small turning. He’s inordinately relieved that the turning’s still there, that it’s the same. One more familiarity in a world that’s feeling increasingly unfamiliar. 

She doesn’t talk, not really, she doesn’t talk and she doesn’t tell him that the dust of the desert’s going to ruin the paint on her car (and even if it did, he could repaint it for her for free). She doesn’t complain when he tells her to stop and he clambers out of the car. In fact, she just follows him with a surprised cry of his name, her shoes not quite right for tromping through the desert but she follows anyway.

“Michael.” 

Her voice carries and Michael stops at the boarded-up entrance to the mines. It feels… it feels _wrong_ and there’s a panic clawing at his throat because he can’t feel the pods. Normally he can feel their energy humming against his skin. 

“Michael, what’re we doing here?” 

He pulls the board back and carefully places it to one side. “I just- I just need-” 

“Okay.”

That’s it? He wants to ask her why the fuck she’s just letting him drag her out into the desert if their pods aren’t hidden away there, if there’s nothing fucking abnormal about them here or whatever the fuck this place is. He wants to ask her why she’s looking at him like he’s fragile as spun glass. But he doesn’t. He just marches into the depths of the mines he’s walked since he was a child and finds it empty.

There’s no warm pink light, no ethereal humming against his skin. The pods aren’t there. There’s no disturbance on the ground, no books or blankets from Max and Isobel’s vigils respectively. There’s no sign that this has been as close to a third home as anything else in the world. He stands in the middle of the empty space and turns on the spot before he sinks to his knees.

His fingers grasp at the dirt, feeling it slide free and fall to the ground. Isobel comes to a crouch beside him, a distinct lack of recognition on her face as she wraps her arms around his shoulders and pulls him in. He feels her rocking him slightly and he lets her as her hand slips into his hair and massages through his curls in a way that feels familial and familiar in a way that he knows it shouldn’t. Isobel doesn’t do this for him. She never has.

“Oh, Michael,” she breathes, lips against his temple. He feels like he’s missing something cosmically obvious but he can’t bring himself to ask what it is. “Come on, let’s go to mom’s.”

“Your mom’s,” he corrects automatically and Isobel pulls away from him, leaving a cold draft running down him. She sits back on her haunches and he feels her eyes piercing into him. It makes him flinch. 

“ _Our_ mom.” There’s a tone in her voice that makes Michael feel like this is an old argument they’ve had time and time again. The sharpness at the edge of her voice tells him that it’s an argument she thought was put to rest a long time ago. “You know she hates it when you say that.” 

He wants to apologise, but he doesn’t know what for, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t understand what the fuck happened and he needs to just _think_ and work it out and when he’s got an understanding of the colossal joke that’s being played on him he can work out what to do next. 

“Come on.”

She gets to her feet and holds out her hand. 

“There’s nothing here, Michael.” 

It hurts. It’s the truth, but it hurts. He takes her hand and she pulls him to her feet and doesn’t let go until they get to the car.

***

Lunch is weird. It’s the only word he has for it. When he gets there, Iz and Max’s mom and dad greet him with warm hugs and kisses to his temple. Anne wraps him in another hug and calls him _my precious boy_ and tucks herself under his arm, staying close until she has to go and tend to the food. Paul asks how he’s doing and claps him gently on the shoulder. Michael says he’s fine, but tired, and Paul gives him the smallest of smiles and lets go, accepting that Michael wants - or needs - space even if Michael gets the distinct impression it’s given more than a little reluctantly.

Isobel’s in the kitchen with her parents, talking about Bridge Club and that Noah’ll be along soon - Michael’s fingers tighten around the bannister at the thought of Noah being near his sister again but he keeps walking up the stairs. Photos line the walls, similar to the pictures in Isobel’s photo album. He doesn’t touch them, though he wants to. There’s a Michael in those photos, draped over Isobel, standing with his arms around Max, flopped in a pile with the twins, obviously laughing. School graduation photos age up the staircase finishing with college graduations and Michael does touch then.

He traces the image with his fingertips, the grinning face that looks back at him holding his diploma, dressed in cape and mortarboard, looks so unlike him that it’s jarring. He’s in UNM colours and he looks so _happy_. There are pictures of him with Anne and Paul, on either side, all of them smiling and bright and proud. There are pictures of him and Max’s graduation, pictures of him in the background of Liz and Max photos where they’re being disgusting and Michael's playing up for the camera. There are pictures of Isobel’s wedding, warm and perfect, her forehead resting against Noah’s, their eyes closed in perfect bliss.

He turns to look at the opposite wall and he can see pictures from their senior prom. A picture of the three of them, mucking about for the camera in front of the school. There aren’t any other official pictures there but Michael spots that his suit has a different coloured flower in it; he didn’t match Isobel and he knows that means he had a date. His chest tightens, skitters a little. Underneath a bunch of printed out candid photos, there’s a blank space, conspicuous in its emptiness.

“Mikey?” Anne’s voice makes him jump as she comes to join him three-quarters of the way up the stairs. She sees where his fingers are brushing against the wall in the area that’s clearly missing a photograph because the paint in the rectangle is brighter than the surrounding wall.

“Where’s the photo that belongs here?” 

He watches the way her jaw tightens and she swallows. Her eyes move to the gap on the wall, and then to Michael and an expression just to the left of guilt flickers into her eyes. 

“I thought- I thought it would be easier for there not to be reminders.” She brushes past him and re-emerges a moment later with a photo frame in her hands. She looks crushed as she brushes her fingers over the image and Michael can’t see it. She hands it over and pats him on the chest as she leaves him to return to the conversation that floats up from downstairs.

Michael looks at the photo, wondering who he’s going to see that made Anne look so upset.

His heart clenches again, this time it’s so painful he nearly drops the precious picture. 

He’s seventeen and the flower in his jacket matches the one in Alex’s. They’ve got their arms wrapped around each other and Michael doesn’t think he’s ever looked happier. Michael looks at it and he’s struck with a sense of nostalgia and longing that’s so painful he doesn’t know what to do with it. He wanted that at prom but he didn’t know Alex well enough. 

The careful treatment makes sense, now. If he broke up with Alex here, too, if somehow the fates had refused to align _again_ to cut him a fucking break, of course, the people that are his… (family? Kin? What the fuck was he to them anyway, another mouth to have fed? A pity adoption? He needed to find out because he had no idea) his… his _people_ would want to protect him from the reminder of a painful break-up.

It doesn’t matter where he is, his world still seems to revolve around Alex fucking Manes.

He places the picture in its spot on the wall and carefully heads downstairs, summoning up a smile and an ‘I’m okay, guys, really’, and though no one believes him - and no one says anything but he can see the way they’re careful not to bring up Alex Manes during conversation, even when Liz arrives with a tighter-than-necessary hug and despite Michael’s desire to ask more, a small ball of person latches around his thigh and shrieks _Uncle Mikey!_ and his attention is effectively stolen. Little!Liz is adorable and just as smart as her mom and Michael’s putty in her hands. If he’s aware of their eyes on him, and the hushed conversations, he’s too busy listening to Little!Liz telling him about her school science project to pay it too much mind. He’ll just ask Alex about it later.

***

He doesn’t go to Alex’s. After having managed to gently nudge the conversation down a memory lane he’s definitely never walked, Michael needs to take some time to recalibrate. To think about what the fuck happened last night that’s resulted in him living in a world where everything turned out okay. He listened to Anne and Paul Evans - _his parents, apparently_ \- talk about walking into Roswell’s group home on a busy open day, thinking they might find one child to give a home to and ended up taking home the triplets that changed their life for the better. He watched how Anne’s face lit up as she talked - happily and so, so fondly - about watching them all grow up together, working as a perfect little unit and the day that Michael - the most reticent of them all to accept his new home - called her mom.

When she excused herself, tears in her eyes, Michael was compelled to stand up and go after her. She’d cupped his face and told him that she loved him and let him hug her, rest his chin atop her head and rock her slightly as she apologised and told him she’d make an effort to not be a mess next time because he didn’t need it right now. He’d just kissed her forehead - the action made her shoulders sag in relief and Michael realised that if the way she felt here was even an echo of how Max and Isobel’s mom felt it was no wonder that she’d always held an air of grief around her at having never been allowed to parent - and reassured her that it was good to hear things. That he liked listening to her talk about his childhood. 

Even if it felt tortuous; listening to a life that wasn’t his while everyone else was expecting him to react as though it was.

After deciding to fight the Alex Issue (as he’s taken to calling the careful way everyone avoids just talking about him completely) later, he goes to the Crashdown where Arturo and Gabriela Ortecho greeted him with a warm smile and a free milkshake, settling him in a booth. Arturo asks him how work is going and with a lack of any actual answer, Michael just shrugs and says _it’s work, you know how it is_ and Arturo laughs and claps him on the shoulder. Gabriela asks how he’s holding up and he gives a similar response. She squeezes his forearm and pushes a basket of curly fries in front of him and tells him that he’s looking skinny and he needs to eat more.

Rosa joins him halfway through the meal and he sees a simple golden wedding band sitting against her skin and he feels a dizzying sense of relief ripple through him. She’s alive and she’s bright and she tells him that Holly’s with Mimi which means Rosa can finally work in her studio in peace as she has a show coming up soon and she’s so underprepared it isn’t even funny. He listens to her talk about the show and she steals his fries unremorsefully. She eats more of them than he does and when he asks her where the gallery is she gives him a look and rolls her eyes, flicking his forearm affectionately and telling him she’s hardly surprised that his big brain can’t hold trivial information since he’s busy changing the world. Just like her sister. 

She’s so _proud_ , and vibrant and _alive_ and Michael can’t breathe as he thinks about how Rosa not dying changed everything. Even if this is a dream, it feels earth-shatteringly painful to know that a single act had meant everyone seems to have a happily ever after. Well, everyone except him, if the careful way they avoid talking about his break up with Alex is anything to go by. But that’s okay; he could probably fix that with a conversation. He hoped. He still wasn’t sure if this was real or just a very interesting dream brought on by too much acetone and heartbreak but either way he was making the most of it. There’s a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that there’s something he’s forgetting and he tells himself he’ll focus on that more. But first, he wants to hear Rosa’s memories of her wedding to Maria, since it apparently only happened last year. 

The thing that sticks out to him the most, though, other than how happy Rosa looks as she recounts her wedding day with the classic Ortecho drama that he’s grown to love in Liz, is that once again there’s no mention of Alex.

***

That evening, he takes stock of what he’s learned and decides to confront Alex. He borrows Isobel’s car as he finally works out that his truck is in for repair (though why he didn’t just fix it himself he has no idea) and drives out to the Project Shepherd bunker. He’s known the override code for months, but when he approaches the building, it’s run down and a mess. The whole thing is overgrown and hasn’t been touched in years. He locates the bunker entrance and taps the panel but there’s no response. The power’s out.

He uses his powers to make the doors cave in, and they go much more easily than he’d anticipated. The abandoned base is really fucking creepy, but not as creepy as climbing down the ladder into an empty area with cobwebs and pretty much nothing else. He does do a cursory check around - just in case - but there’s fucking nothing, it's nothing like the living base he visits every now and then to collect tech when Kyle says it’s ready, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alex but Alex is a fucking ninja and is respecting the ‘need for space’ that Michael had insisted on. And fuck he regrets that. He regrets it even more now that he’s ended up _here_ somehow and here isn’t _home_ because he doesn’t fucking know where Alex is.

The cabin’s the next stop. The sun’s almost fully set by the time he arrives and he almost falls out of the car in his hurry to head up to tap on the door. The spare key isn’t where Alex normally leaves it, and there’s no snuffling on the other side of the door to let him know that Wentz is there. It’s not _that_ late, and for a moment he thinks that the cabin, like the bunker, is completely abandoned. Until a light clicks on from inside.

Michael’s heart hammers in his throat and anticipation bubbles inside his chest, soaring so high the only way it could go was down. He doesn’t realise that he’s set his hopes too high until the door swings open and someone that is definitely not Alex is standing on the other side of the door. He stares, the bottom dropping out of his stomach and those hopes that had been in the stratosphere come plummetting down to earth and he hadn’t realised how he’d been _expecting_ Alex to be there. 

“Michael,” Jim Valenti said with a warm, but confused, smile. He leans a shoulder against the doorframe and folds his arms across his chest. “Not that it’s not nice to see you, but it is pretty late. Are you okay, son?” He pushes off the door frame and steps to the side, the universal indicator of _do you want to come in?_ and Michael shakes his head, pushes a hand through his curls and balls his other hand into a fist.

He doesn’t really remember Jim Valenti; he never had much to do with him but a quick glance at the table by the door shows the sheriff badge resting against it and Michael reasons that he can’t be the town drunk if Roswell’s sheriff is greeting him like a friend. He hates the person whose life he’s inhabiting - if that’s what this is. He hates the fact that Michael Evans has made something of himself in such a way that everyone likes him, possibly more than Alex considering he’s never mentioned (though it’s impossible for him to envisage any kind of reality where anyone likes him more than Alex). He hates that for everything that’s fucked up in his life, it’s perfect here. And Michael doesn’t _belong_. 

“I- no- I’m- I’m sorry Sherriff.” The words trip awkwardly off his tongue and he swallows, taking a step backwards even as Jim frowns, reaches out and he lifts his hands to try and stop a man who was famously fatherly (if you ignored his involvement in the systematic dissection and torture of his people, which he _couldn’t_ ) from trying to comfort him.

“Michael-”

“No- it- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come out here. I just thought-” 

“Kyle’s at home,” Jim answers and the comment throws Michael for a loop and he just nods dumbly and keeps backing up. “I’ll let him know you stopped by.” 

Why would Valenti tell… Valenti? He doesn’t have time to unpack that. He needs a fucking drink and he needs to find Alex. There’s only one place he hasn’t checked yet. He apologises again to the Sheriff for bothering him and climbs back into Isobel’s car, sticking it into reverse and peeling out of the cabin. 

Alex’ll be at the Pony. 

He has to be.

***

Pulling into the parking lot of the Wild Pony almost feels like coming home. Despite how fraught his recent trips have been since Maria called time on what wasn’t ever going to work despite how desperately Michael wanted _normal_ , the sign’s still comforting. The slightly chipped paint’s familiar and welcoming and as he spins Isobel’s keys around his finger he feels a lightness in his chest for the first time since he woke up in a strange bed with a name that wasn’t his in a world he doesn’t belong in. His too-comfortable boots don’t squeak as he crosses the threshold of a place that embraces him like an old lover. It’s warm inside, warm and sticky with spilt drinks. There’s raised voices and people laughing and right in the centre behind the bar is Maria. She’s as radiant here as he remembers, the effervescence of her beauty pours out of every smile and he thinks that in another life he could have loved her. He could have loved her the way she deserves. But they both know he can’t; his heart, his soul, fuck- everything he has belongs to Alex Manes and it always will, despite his desperate attempts to force himself to believe otherwise.

He offers her an easy grin when she sees him and the one she shoots back at him is so bright it makes his heart stutter painfully in his chest. She’s never greeted him with such warmth, not without a playfully cutting banter following quickly behind. There’s a softness in the edges of the grin and she tips her head to the side, waiting for him to approach before she smiles and rests her hands on the bar. He catches a wedding band sitting against her skin that matches the one he’d seen on Rosa’s hand earlier. 

“Mikey,” she greets, reaching her hand over the bar to curl her fingers around his, squeezing once. Something crosses her face, vacancy in her eyes for a split second and she looks at him warily before it lifts from her face like a cloud passing over the sun. “What can I get for you?” 

“Whiskey,” Michael answers, sliding onto a stool and resting his forearms on the bar. He ignores the slight look of surprise that crosses Maria’s face before she just nods and moves to get him one. “It’s been one hell of a fucking day.” 

Her shoulders stiffen when he swears and he curses himself inwardly. He wets his lower lip, accepts the glass when it’s pushed towards him and he knocks it back. He ignores the creeping concern that’s crawling into Maria’s eyes. It’s two steps away from pity and he’s getting a little tired of it now. Whatever happened between him and Alex, he can fucking take it. It can’t be worse than the situation he’s currently in. 

“What happened?” she asks finally and Michael’s shoulders slump. He taps two fingers on the glass and pushes it back towards her and he watches as she reluctantly refills it for him. 

He nurses this one, at least. “Woke up just feeling… _wrong_ ,” he starts, chewing on his lower lip and taking a sip of the amber liquid inside the glass, swirling it as he looks down into it. “Had lunch with the Evanses and watched Iz play happy families with Noah.” He can’t help the way his face contorts in disgust. There’s no evidence that Noah’s an alien serial killer since everything’s right here but also everything’s _wrong_. “Liz’s dad and- and mom gave me free stuff and patted me on the shoulder and everyone’s treating me like I’m made of fucking glass.”

He glances up, daring Maria to say something but she, wisely, doesn’t. She just waits for him to finish. 

He wets his lower lip.

“And I can’t find Alex _anywhere_. He’s not at the cabin, he’s not- I just can’t find him and no one’ll talk about it and-” He looks up, seeing the way that Maria’s expression has _frozen_ , wide-eyed and shining with what look like tears. Her jaw twitches, the way it always does when he’s said something that’s annoyed her. “And I figured,” he carries on because the words are spilling out of him now, “if anyone was gonna tell me where he’s holed himself up it’d be you. So.” He pats the bar with both hands, “Where’s Alex?”

Maria says nothing for a moment before she speaks, her voice low and calm but with an undertone of hurt and outrage, swallowing past a lump in her throat. 

“Michael,” she starts, brow furrowed, “that’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny,” he retorts, frustration slipping into his tone. She doesn’t move, but something behind her draws his attention. There’s a collection of photos there, what looks like a collage of high school photos and in the centre of them all, like the focal point all the other photos halo is a photo of Alex.

It’s the words underneath that catch his attention and in that moment, Michael can hear the universe collapsing around him in the roaring of blood in his ears as loudly as he can feel his chest caving into the black hole where his heart is.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first thing he notices is that it’s _cold_. Considering he knows full well he hadn’t fallen asleep with the AC on again, it’s confusing to him as to why it’s so cold. As awareness filters through his sleepy brain, he also realises that he can’t feel the heavy weight of his comforter over his legs or hips, that the softness of his pillow has been replaced with the scratchiness of a threadbare, flattened lump of synthetic… something. Rubbing at his eyes and having a brief moment of thinking that he’d fallen asleep in the lab (but his lab never smelt of sandalwood, stale air and nail polish remover, with an undertone of tequila that makes him remember none-too-fondly his time as a boisterous undergrad at UNM), he tries to acquaint himself with his surroundings. The shiny metal surfaces are familiar, but as he pushes himself upright and runs his hand through his hair, he realises that’s where the similarities end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [InsidiousIntent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsidiousIntent/pseuds/InsidiousIntent) and [Beamirang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beamirang/pseuds/beamirang) for hand-holding and screaming at me over the last 24hours.

The first thing he notices is that it’s _cold_. Considering he knows full well he hadn’t fallen asleep with the AC on again, it’s confusing to him as to why it’s so cold. As awareness filters through his sleepy brain, he also realises that he can’t feel the heavy weight of his comforter over his legs or hips, that the softness of his pillow has been replaced with the scratchiness of a threadbare, flattened lump of synthetic… something. Rubbing at his eyes and having a brief moment of thinking that he’d fallen asleep in the lab (but his lab never smelt of sandalwood, stale air and nail polish remover, with an undertone of tequila that makes him remember none-too-fondly his time as a boisterous undergrad at UNM), he tries to acquaint himself with his surroundings. The shiny metal surfaces are familiar, but as he pushes himself upright and runs his hand through his hair, he realises that’s where the similarities end. 

This place is nothing like his lab. It’s some kind of lab, for sure, but it’s not _his_ lab. He doesn’t have scribbled charts on yellowed, curling paper tacked to the walls. He doesn’t have faded photos from the ‘40s hanging in cheap brown frames or chalkboard sketches of black hole vectors. He doesn’t have scraps of paper stuck on the opposite wall, metal tables lined with shining pieces of pink, iridescent glass. He also definitely has much better lighting in his lab.

The musty smell of the air tells him he’s underground which he might have worked out even if he hadn’t heard the gentle _thwm-thwm-thwm_ of the fans pushing air from the surface down into the claustrophobically small area. Some of the tech, he thinks, as he looks around, is really old and some of it looks so futuristic he has no idea where to even begin trying to classify it. He kind of wants to, though. 

On the central table of the room, there’s a… well. A _thing_. He tilts his head, stretching his arms above himself and feeling his shoulders popping in a way that brings relief from an ache that he hadn’t realised was there until he stretched. Now he’s aware of it, he can feel the way his whole body just _hurts_. He classifies the aches, they’re old and familiar (or at least they should be). His hand’s got a dull throbbing and he stares at the back of it for a moment, like he should be able to see the injury that makes it ache so but there’s nothing there. Unblemished, unmarred skin that conceals a bone-deep ache. He flexes his fingers and goes back to categorising himself.

One thing’s for certain. He’s _hungry_. His mouth tastes like something crawled in there and died overnight and when his boot (just a little too small and so uncomfortable, like his jeans, ill-fitting and scratchy against his skin and when was the last time this shirt was washed?) knocks against something that chinks, rolls and then hits something else that also chinks, he sees three empty bottles of alcohol of various types lying empty.

So. An alcoholic bender. Interesting. And definitely not his idea of a normal evening’s activity. Not even on a weekend. Not even after they managed to beat out Harvard’s arrogant application from the AAG to expand their research of the shape of the universe to factor in the newest theories of the multiverse based on the work Stephen Hawking had started before his death. 

He brushes his hair away from his forehead and checks his wrist to look for his watch, to check the date. He doesn’t need to, his soul knows the weight of the week that’s coming up and his skin’s already crawling. His watch isn’t on his wrist, which, of course it isn’t because he’s woken up in some sort of underground laboratory surrounded by things that he doesn’t recognise and he’s wearing things that he never, in a million years, would put on willingly. Of course the watch his dad bought him after receiving his second PhD wouldn’t be on his wrist. 

He rubs his palms over his face, smooths his hands through his hair and steps closer to the central table to examine the _thing_. It’s got a faint blue glow about it and the air around it almost hums like it’s emitting a low-static charge. It’s gun-metal grey and four triangular pieces of engraved metal fold together to a point like a pyramid, seamlessly fused. He touches it with a nearby pencil but nothing happens. Not to the pencil, and not to him. Which is a relief. Absently, he thinks that he should write down what he’s doing because that’s what makes it science and he’s already reaching for a yellow legal pad when he spots a small slot along one of the lower edges. Poking it with the pencil again, he chances a nudge with his fingertip and the panel rewards him with a glow, and flutters with rippling iridescent shimmers. Something approaching a number pad appears and though the writing on it matches some of the scrawled shapes on the wall, it’s not a language or numerical system that he’s seen before. 

He pulls the pad closer to himself, intending on writing down the images only to find that the first page he looks at has them scrawled down already in a hand that he definitely, one hundred percent recognises. It’s his handwriting. Still, he flips the page over and copies it out himself anyway, head tilted to the side and tongue caught between his teeth, sweeping his curls back from his forehead and wishing he had his glasses to hold them in place (the small voice in the back of his head that sounds like Liz reminds him that glasses are for seeing, not for use as expensive headbands, but he’s still refusing to fall into _that_ stereotype any more than he already has with his tailored jackets and paper-stuffed office filled with star-charts and forgotten coffee cups). 

Once he’s happy with his rendition of the images, he wanders around the table, pad between his fingers and pencil tapping out a staccato rhythm curiosity getting the better of him in the same way it has done countless times over the years when he’s got something to deal with in the ‘real world’ that he doesn’t want to. His fingers brush the edge of the worn table, feeling the way that the wood’s smoothed down through age and constant movement, worn down like a stone on the beach. He wonders if the table’s as old as the bunker and catches himself wandering down a mental path that wouldn’t help anyone. Least of all him.

He does go over to the pink glass object that’s sitting half-obscured by a dark grey tarpaulin and runs his fingers over it. He doesn’t know what it is, but it’s covered in the same symbols as the _other_ object on the table in the centre of the room. It’s fascinating. Though he knows he can’t avoid going above ground any longer because he needs to work out where he is and what happened to result in him being Not At Home. Perhaps he could call Liz, and share the information with her and they could work together on what was going on to make sense of it.

He just needs a phone. 

There’s one on the edge of the first table and he swaps it for the yellow legal pad, swiping at the screen and frowning when he sees that the battery reads _1%_. Well, then he needs a _charger_ and then he can make those phone calls. He has to go upstairs (well, up the ladder) now. Whatever’s up there has to have a charger as he can’t see one down here.

He pockets the phone and heads towards the ladder when another pile of papers catches his eye. There are genetic mappings on those ones; he recognises it from the research he helped Liz with just after she got her doctorate. Red blood cell photographs too, but there’s an anomaly in the picture.s, there’s telltale signs of electromagnetic, or possibly electrostatic, interference surrounding some of the cells. Telling himself he’ll go upstairs after he’s had a look at the papers, he crouches down smoothly (ignoring how the jeans tighten around his knees and the bones in his body ache like he’s just run three laps of the campus carrying every copy of his dissertation in his backpack). 

His mouth feels drier than the New Mexico desert as his gaze catches on the image labels in small, neat, printed lettering, indicating to whom the samples belong.

 _Isobel Evans-Bracken_. _Max Evans_. _Michael Guerin_.

***

Dr Michael Evans - Mikey, to everyone that knows him in a non-professional context - realises as he surfaces from what he can only describe as a ‘bunker’, that he hasn’t thought this through at all. The papers are rolled up and stuffed into the other back pocket so he can look at them in better light (that’s the only reason he couldn’t read them properly and that’s a hill he’ll die on; he doesn’t need glasses despite what the optometrist says) while he waits for the phone to charge.

He surfaces and squints against the bright sunlight. He isn’t sure why, but he’d expected it to be the middle of the night, so being greeted by the mid-morning sun is an unpleasant sensation. Clambering up onto the ground and knocking the lid of the bunker shut, he stands up and rubs the back of his neck, taking a moment to survey the surrounding area. He’s trying very hard to stay calm. There’s papers in his back pocket of bloodwork and DNA sequencing labelled with his family’s name (but not his, but whoever this Guerin person is shares some common genetic markers with _his_ siblings and he’s not sure he’s okay with that). He woke up in a bunker with no memory of how he got there, dressed like a disenfranchised, stereotypical cowboy in need of a wardrobe upgrade and lessons in how to use fabric softener. There’s a phone he can’t use because the battery’s nearly dead and he’s standing…

Well. He’s at Sanders’. 

That’s something. He knows where he is, at least, which is a vast improvement over the position he’d been in ten minutes ago. Behind him, there’s a battered Airstream and he takes a breath before walking towards it, around to the front where he raps on the door with his knuckles, head tilted as he waits, listening for sounds from inside to tell him that the inhabitant is home.

“Hello?” he calls, “I- uh- I woke up in your bunker. Think you could-” He cuts himself off, firstly because there’s no answer from inside the Airstream and secondly he realises that it’s bordering on Max-levels of stupid to ask the inhabitant of the Airstream - and possibly the owner of the mad-science bunker that he woke up in - to answer his questions. He might not have the sense God gave him half the time (at least, not according to his mom when she’s talking him through for the eighth time how to avoid shrinking his clothes in the washer) but a lifetime of being the smartest guy in the room has taught him pretty strong self-preservation skills. Or so he tells himself. 

He waits for another five seconds before he pushes down on the handle of the Airstream and pulls the door open. It isn’t locked, and Mikey’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad one at this juncture but against his better judgement he steps inside because he needs to look at the papers that are burning a hole in his back pocket, he needs to find a phone charger and he needs to check in on his family. 

Unsure as to what, specifically, he’d been expecting when he walked into the trailer, Mikey’s still shocked at the state of the inside. Closing the door behind himself out of habit more than anything else, he stands in the entry feeling something akin to deep, rolling dismay in the pit of his stomach. He thinks first about how unbearably hot it must get in the middle of the summer, sat without any hope of shade, and then he thinks that whoever lives here must be desperately sad and lonely.

There’s paper covering the windows, yellowed with age. Empty beer bottles - and more than a few bottles of something significantly stronger - are on the sides, clustered in small groupings as though someone thought about throwing them out but lost the will to do so before completing the action. There are clothes on the floor and belt buckles in a box sticking out from under the bed. It smells of whiskey and nail polish remover and Mikey rubs his hand under his nose like that might clear the smell and stop it clinging to his skin, even though he’s pretty sure the smell’s already embedded deep within the fabric of the clothes he’s wearing. 

He pushes the door open again and warm air sweeps into the trailer, rustling the odd piece of paper but it’s hardly enough to air it out. It’d take more than ten seconds of an open door to do that, he thinks. Thank God he doesn’t live here. 

He has a cursory nose around for a phone charger but he can’t find one, so without preamble, he quickly taps the first three digits of Isobel’s number into the phone and lifts it to his ear as it auto-completes the rest of the number. Wedging it between his ear and shoulder, Michael keeps digging around. 

_You’ve reached the voicemail of Isobel Evans, leave your name and number after the beep and I’ll get back to you. Or just text me._

“Iz,” he starts, tugging open a drawer to find a collection of bottle openers and beer mats. No phone charger. “Something really weird’s happened and I need to talk to you. Where are you? I’m hoping at home; I’ll be there in a bit once I work out how to get to you from Sanders’. Love you.”

He hangs up and repeats: Max next. The phone rings out.

_The voicemail box you’re trying to reach is currently full. Please try again later._

It cuts off and Mikey tries twice more before realising he isn’t going to get through to Max. He dials another number, one he’s been ringing for over twenty years whenever he needed anything and pins the phone between his shoulder and ear again, throat feeling tight with an anxiety he can’t - won’t - place.

_The number you have dialled is disconnected. The number you have dialled is disconnected. The number you have dialled is di-_

The cell phone runs out of battery which stops it from mocking him that the number isn’t working. It isn’t a relief as much as it’s a stark reminder that there is something exceptionally _wrong_ here and he doesn’t know what it is. 

Swearing softly under his breath, Mikey throws the phone onto the bed and isn’t surprised at all when it doesn’t seem to bounce even a little. Of course it doesn’t; everything here looks like it’s older than he is so the mattress on the tiny single cot-bed is probably just as lumpy and unforgiving as the rest of the trailer’s interior. His hands push through his hair and he unfurls the papers from his back pocket, laying them flat.

He’s always been a fast reader, and the techniques for speed-reading he’d learned his first year at MIT following his graduation from UNM helped his comprehension tenfold. Despite all of that, the images and reports he reads - _Antar, alien, pod, electrostatic components, molecular manipulation, abilities_ \- sink in but he can’t actually comprehend what they say on the basis that they say that the three people who are the focus of these reports are, and he has to stress this, Not Human.

***

Mikey isn’t sure how long he spends reading the reports over and over as though repetition would make the words would magically morph into something that wasn’t categorical proof that aliens existed and had taken on the form of his siblings. There aren’t pictures of Isobel & Max Evans, or Michael Guerin, but he has a nauseating certainty that the Isobel & Max Evans in the papers are his siblings. His Isobel and Max. He doesn’t know who Michael Guerin is, but he’s beginning to theorise something that is exceptionally unpleasant. It makes an unnatural cold creep into his skin.

The theory’s further solidified when he stands from the uncomfortable bed and accidentally knocks the black Stetson off the side. When it falls to the floor, he sees a wallet, brown leather, not as cheap as he’d been expecting it to be. It’s creased and old, taken care of as well as anything can be in a place like this and he reaches out with a hand that’s shaking slightly to pick it up and open it.

There’s less than $20 inside, not really any bank cards and certainly no credit ones. He does see a battered New Mexico driver’s license, however, and even though he’s expecting to see his own face looking back at him stamped _Michael Guerin_ , it’s still a shock. The man in the photo has his face, but there’s bruising around an eye, his lip looks like it’s been split in a fight and the look in his eyes is that of a man who has nothing left to lose. There’s a level of stubble on his cheeks that Mikey would never allow himself to have and the wild, errantness of his curls is almost physically painful to look at. Mikey, who even at his lowest point never let himself look that bad, is horrified.

He grabs the mirror in front of him and tilts it upwards to see his face. He doesn’t _look_ fundamentally different which he might have been expecting to since he’s apparently Sam Becketted his way somewhere else, which makes the prevailing theory rumbling around his brain feel more concrete.

Still. Things can’t be that different, can they? He wonders which theory is correct; bubble? Infinite? Daughter? Parallel? He peruses the information he has in front of him; there’s a lot of yellowed newspaper covering the 1947 Roswell crash. That happened, he knows that. Well, he knows there was a lot of sensationalism about a ship that crashed but - having had top-secret clearance since he was twenty-three - he knows that it wasn’t aliens. Just experimental foreign technology. Looks like it might have been aliens, here. Looks like it might have been Max and Isobel and… and him? 

The belt buckle box is still half-out and Mikey goes to push it back under the bed when the corner of a photograph catches his attention. He knows the photo, he’d know it even if he forgot everything else in the world. It was their senior year field trip out to the desert, one of the brightest and best memories he has of an adolescence that was filled with happy memories. Sitting down on the bed again, he reaches into the box and pulls it out a little, resting it between his ankles.

There aren’t many pictures and he looks different in them; scrawnier, angrier. At least he’s stood next to Isobel, she has her arms around him and she’s laughing, which at least has made him look happy. There’s one of the three of them goofing off and then the next picture- 

Mikey’s throat closes up. It’s him and Alex Manes. Alex who… who’s wearing eyeliner and a long-sleeved black shirt. There’s a piercing under his nose, but it’s Alex. It’s still _his Alex_. Grief opens in his chest, cavernous and echoing. His therapist had told him one day it would stop hurting but he’s eight years on and he still can’t breathe. He runs his thumb over Alex’s smiling face, and then his own, and thinks about tucking the photo into the battered wallet. It’s obviously looked at a lot; the edges are frayed like a thumb just runs along the outside of the photo carefully so as not to damage the picture itself. He feels his eyes burning, lump in his throat stealing coherent thought away and he finds himself diving into the box, pulling things out to find something - _anything_ \- that tells him Alex had a different fate here. Because if Alex was alive then he- he’d be _happy_.

But there’s nothing. There are no more photos of Alex, or even of him with his siblings. It’s like he stopped existing after that day.

It slams into him with a force he knows: he’s in a daughter universe. One where he spiralled after Alex’s death instead of crawling into the comfort of his family. One where he wasted his life in grief and alcohol. Alex isn’t alive here, he isn’t living a better life. Alex is gone.

He dashes his hand across his face, under his eyes, and sniffs. He leaves the photo of Alex on the bed. He doesn’t fold it into careful quarters and put it in the wallet that he shoves into the back pocket of his uncomfortable jeans. He can’t bring himself to ruin something that looks so well cared for. 

He just closes his fingers around the keys sitting near the door and climbs into the truck, slightly rusted but the engine turns over fine. 

He needs Isobel. He needs Max. He needs his _mom_.

***

The drive to Isobel’s is easy. He knows it well, even from Sanders’ Auto. He’s done it enough times since she first moved there after marrying Noah that he could probably do it blindfolded (not that he ever would; that’s _reckless_ and would be far more dangerous than impressive). So when he pulls the rattling truck into the driveway to find her silver Audi gone he frowns a little. It doesn’t stop him climbing out of the car in a hurry, tripping over his feet almost as he rushes to the door and rings the bell.

No answer. 

He tries the handle. The door’s locked. He frowns, looks around for the ugly gnome that he’d bought her for Christmas the year after she moved in. She’d told him it was hideous and always kept it facing the wall but she’d kept it, and she’d used it which worked for him considering he was always forgetting his keys. But it wasn’t there. He ventured to the small front garden, looked around to see if it had been moved but it wasn’t anywhere.

Cupping his hands around his face, forehead against the front window, he sees no sign of movement inside. Realising he’s forgotten the phone - he never had found a charger, after all - Mikey just takes in a shaking breath and twists the keys around his index finger.

Maybe she’s at the office.

***

She’s not at the office. Neither is Noah. In fact, no one’s seen or heard from Noah for just over six months.

Mikey’s told that when he finds Mr Bracken, he’s to tell him that he’s fired.

***

Isobel isn’t at the gym, or the grocery store, or any of the other half a dozen places that he checks for her, feeling more and more frantic with each place that passes and doesn’t hold his sister. The three of them have always been closer than anything; the Evans triplets. Not a single one of them really believes in psychic abilities but they’ve always just _known_ when something was wrong.

It’s distressing for him to not be able to reach her.

Maybe she’s at Max’s, he thinks. He hasn’t even considered trying to call Liz, or swing in on the Crashdown to check on the Ortechos. He needs to find his siblings.

He gets back in the truck and he drives.

***

Mikey’s never before cursed Max for living so far out of town but today the drive is way, _way_ too long. When Max found this perfect place, forty minutes outside of Roswell, Mikey was actively pleased for him. It wasn’t too far for Liz to drive out to and it was far enough away that Max’s inspiration and creativity wouldn’t be dampened or stomped by the town. He wrote _The Saviour_ there, three months of sleep-deprivation and bear claws. It makes him smile thinking about it, Max’s debut novel about refugees from another world crash landing on earth, has just been picked up by Netflix. Max and Liz were set for life, he thinks, considering everything his brother touched turned to gold.

The pride distracts him for the last few miles of the drive, only to be washed away with the bucket of ice-water realisation that Max’s house, too, is dark and empty. It’s not locked, though, which is hardly unusual for Max (Mikey keeps telling him to lock his doors, not everyone’s as afraid of Liz as he is, but it never works), so he lets himself in with a rap on the door for politeness’ sake though he’s so far past polite it’s ridiculous.

He flicks the lights on and looks around; there’s chaos inside. There’s a faded patch of deep red near the bookcase Mikey remembers helping Max to build. It looks like blood, but he can’t be sure. There are tiny shards of broken glass, subtle but there. The whole place looks like it’s been cleaned up in a hurry so the finer details have been forgotten about.

Hysteria bubbles in his throat, causing him to make a strangled sound, looking around desperately and hoping that there’s some cruel trick being played on him by his brother (though he’s not that kind). He pushes the button to play Max’s answerphone messages as he walks through the house, trying to find traces of Liz. Trying to find traces of Tía. Trying to tell himself that Liz and his niece are okay, that his brother’s okay.

It’s hard when the first voice that plays is Liz’s, broken and wet-sounding. _It’s been three days. I’m so mad at you- what were you thinking? Were you even thinking? I didn’t say- I haven’t- When you wake up, Max Evans I swear to everything that is holy-_

He’s in the back room when another message plays. From Liz. Again. She’s ranting at Max for being an idiot and the familiarity of her tone does nothing to make him feel better about the broken chair and handcuffs in the back room that belongs to his niece. That there’s no sign of Liz here. There’s no sign of his _family_ and there might be blood on the floor. He stumbles out and picks up the phone from Max’s counter and realises that he’s never had to memorise the number for the hospital before and he has no idea what that number actually is. In fact, there are only three numbers he’s ever memorised (and one he’s desperately tried to forget). _Surprisingly_ , Roswell's hospital isn’t among them.

He puts the phone back in the cradle and takes his fingers through his hair, lost for a moment as to what to do. He bangs his way through the cupboards looking for… he doesn’t even know but when he spots a phone book on the side he grabs it to flick through the pages, looking for the one that would give him a number. 

He doesn’t even want to think about what happened, but he can’t stop himself.

***

It turns out that they don’t have a record of Max Evans in the hospital. He isn’t in the major hospitals in Santa Fe or Albuquerque either. Mikey rings about six other hospitals in the local-ish area and tries Isobel’s phone three more times for good measure, his messages getting increasingly more hysterical until the last one was just some sort of panicked garble of nonsense. There’s nothing else for it, he decides. He bolts out of Max’s house and gets back into the truck, kicking up dirt as he speeds back towards town and out of the other side, driving like the Furies are chasing him to the one place he should have just gone straight away.

_Home._

***

He feels like he could cry when he drives into the familiar Roswell suburb, watching the street morph into the houses he grew up chasing his siblings around, front gardens he clambered over when he was hiding from Max as they played cops and robbers when they were younger. The tree Alex fell out of the summer they turned fourteen and broke his wrist’s still there and Mikey remembers with a heavy sense of nostalgia how worried he’d been that Jesse Manes wouldn’t let Alex come over again. He hadn’t understood why he wanted to spend every waking moment with Alex that summer, but when Alex had shyly asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance the next school year and Mikey had felt the world swoop dizzyingly, he’d worked it out pretty quickly.

He has to pull over, four houses away from his mom and dad’s, fingers tight around the steering wheel, breathing harshly through his nose as grief slams over him. He’s felt the tidal wave coming for a while, as he’s been driving through familiar streets. It’s not an unfamiliar sensation but it always catches him unawares. He doesn’t think it should be possible, or fair, to miss someone _so much_ that it constantly takes his breath away, that everything’s a reminder of _something_. He sucks air into lungs that are collapsing like a dying star to help force his crumpled heart pump blood through his veins.

It takes him longer than he’s proud of to pull himself together enough so that he can start the truck again and make the final four house trip to rumble to a halt in front of his mom and dad’s house. As soon as his eyes fall on the familiar lawn, immaculately kept because his mom pays for someone to keep it looking like a spread from one of the magazines the Bridge Club ladies circulate whenever they get together for afternoon tea, something in Mikey’s chest loosens. Relief courses through him strongly enough that he’s not sure his legs’ll hold him, but he gets out of the truck anyway, squares his shoulders and walks to the front door. 

He doesn’t have a key - there are none on the keys to the truck and he assumes that they’re probably on a keyring somewhere in the chaos of the Airstream - so he lifts his hand and knocks on the door. 

Waiting for her to answer is agonising; all he can think about is sinking forwards and resting his head on her shoulder as she wraps her arms around him and rubs her hand through his hair and tells him _it’s okay, love_. She’ll tell him where Max and Isobel are and why he’s got a name other than _Evans_ on his driving licence and why there’s a bunker underneath an airstream with contraptions that look otherworldly. He knows as soon as she opens the door, everything’ll start to make sense again. Moms are good like that. And his mom is the best.

Waiting for her to answer the door is agonising but the agony he feels in waiting is nothing in comparison to the agony of the blank lack of recognition the door swings open. It’s enough to stop him from the way his whole body cries out for him to step into her space and call her _mom_. It’s nothing compared to the way his skin crawls in shame as her eyes sweep up and down him with a vague look of confusion and then _pity_. 

“Max and Isobel aren’t here,” she tells him, her voice carefully distant and completely lacking the affection and motherly warmth he’s so used to hearing. Her expression twists into something approaching apology and sorrow laced with the pity that he’s never seen from her and the mortification that crawls up his spine has him stepping backwards and stammering a little. She doesn’t offer him a hug, or a drink, she doesn’t stand aside to let him come in and flop all over the couch, long-limbed and exhausted and just in need of his mom.

He wets his lower lip and finds he can’t look at her. He can’t look at her and see her looking back at him like he’s a stranger, like a wash-out in need of her pity. The grief that’s already welling up inside him, washing over him and sweeping coherent thought and rational reaction away from him intensifies and he shakes his head, muttering out an apology before he stumbles over his own feet in his hurry to get back into the safety of the truck cabin and the reliable distance of _not here_ so he can try and find somewhere where there’s air he can breathe.

This isn’t it, because this isn’t home.

Alex is dead and his mom doesn’t know him the way she’s supposed to. Max and Isobel are missing and Noah’s AWOL. He can’t find any trace of his niece, the little girl that he loves more than almost anything else in the world and everything is _wrong_. He thinks about going to the Crashdown but he can’t risk Holly also being non-existent, can’t face the reality that perhaps it was more than just one splintered decision that’s ended up with him living in a trailer and subsisting on beer and misery. 

Instead, he pulls the car into a 7/11 parking lot and rests his head against the steering wheel again, forcing the burning in his eyes to go away. Forcing the sorrow and the fear to one side. Trying - and failing - to apply some kind of cool logic to the situation. He’s never been good at that; Mikey feels things deeply and intensely and he always has done but he’s also always had his siblings to temper him, his friends, his family, his _mom_. 

The day’s passed well into the late afternoon, now, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Tomorrow’s going to be a worse day than today because eight years ago today is the day Alex died. Tomorrow’s eight years since he received the phone call. Two days after that is the ten year anniversary of their engagement. 

He can’t do this. Not now.

There’s only one place to go, under the circumstances. Normally he doesn’t go there; he doesn’t like the type of people that frequent it as much as he loves the family that owns the place but he thinks that the person who wears ill-fitting, uncomfortable clothes and whose mother looks at him as though she’s never really met him before has a seat at that bar which has been so well worn by his presence that it’ll be the only thing in this town that greets him like an old friend. The only place that makes him feel like he belongs.

***

Like everything else he’s seen, The Wild Pony looks familiar. The neon sign’s got that flicker to it that he recognises, the paint’s peeling slightly over the door. It’s warm inside and smells of people and spilt drinks. He’s greeted by the sounds of chatter, raised voices having heated discussions and friendly banter. The clack of someone breaking a rack of balls on the pool table. The _whump-thud_ of someone playing darts. Mikey's always struggled to isolate sensory input and stepping into the Pony is just as overwhelming as he’s always found it.

And just as filled with jerks. 

He swallows, ignores the way that there are a few people that look at him in a way he doesn’t like (he thinks they might be spoiling for a fight which is, quite frankly, _ridiculous_ because Mikey’s never punched anyone in his entire life, except for that one time when Hank had been drunk, three weeks after Alex’s death and said something derogatory, indicating that he’d deserved it) and walks towards the bar. 

Maria’s behind the bar. Beautiful, _radiant_ Maria who’s wiping down the bar with a cloth and talking to someone sitting to the side in a leather jacket. Mikey takes a split second to appreciate the way that the jacket hugs the man’s shoulders before catching himself and forcing the thought away. He knows it’s not healthy, but looking at anyone else even fleetingly feels like a betrayal. 

She glances up, sensing his approach the same way she always does and instead of the warm, bright smile she always greets him with there’s wariness in her eyes. A careful separation from the reaction he normally gets. She’s not pleased to see him. She’s also not _not_ pleased to see him. He watches her eyes dart uneasily to the man she’s been talking to and back to him a few times, like she’s trying to weigh up her options as though she can talk to him or the man in front of her but not both.

He keeps moving. He thinks if he stops moving now he might just stall and never re-start. Perpetual motion is the only thing keeping him pushing forwards. Maria can tell him where his siblings are and- 

The guy at the bar shifts on the stool slightly and Mikey watches one of his feet plant on the ground. He’s laughing at something and the sound echoes above the crowd. It’s bright and beautiful and _alive_ and it’s a sound that’s been etched into the best and worst of Mikey’s dreams for years. It’s a sound that haunts him because he can’t ever hear it again and he feels like he never got to hear it _enough_ while he could appreciate it. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Maria,” the man says and the air’s sucked out of the room again. Mikey’s feet stop, stalled just in front of the wooden floor of the bar, frozen. He can see the grain of the flooring, he can see a wet patch where someone’s spilt something and it hasn’t been mopped up yet. He can see his own reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bar and his eyes shift past Maria to the reflection of the man that sounds like-

“A- Alex?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> /o\
> 
>  
> 
> _I'm sorry._


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong in a world where Alex Manes died at twenty. He doesn’t belong in a world where he was adopted by the Evans’ and raised as an important member of a family that looked down their noses at him even as he skinned his knees with Max and Isobel from the age of eleven, as inseparable as the system would let them be. He doesn’t belong here with PhDs and Professorships and friends that send him cards with space-puns inside. Even if it looks perfect on the surface, the fact still remains that even here, even here where he had Alex for longer than he ever dreamed he might have done, he still lost him. 
> 
> He doesn’t belong in a world where Alex Manes fucking _died_ at twenty.

Michael’s been sitting on the dusty floor of the empty bunker for hours. His hands haven’t stopped shaking, yet. His phone’s got more than a dozen missed calls from practically everyone and he’s got no way of explaining to any of them why he freaked out at the Pony, what happened to the lights that all exploded overhead or why he’s sitting in an old, fucking _empty_ fallout shelter in the middle of Sanders’ auto-repair yard cursing the fucking world. 

He still can’t really hear anything over the pounding in his ears, can’t feel anything over the ache in his hand and the creeping numbness that’s radiating from his core. It’s the only thing keeping him from shaking apart, he thinks, trying to shut down before he breaks. His telekinesis ripples underneath his skin, restless and dangerous and desperate. He can’t shake the way Maria looked at him, the way her expression twisted, shifted into sorrow and understanding and something just to the left of love. She can’t shake how she reached across the bar and squeezed his fingers and told him _we miss him, too. This year was always going to be hard, considering_ , like he was supposed to fucking just know what she was talking about and accept that her reassuring him that they all missed Alex made it okay that on the wall behind her was a photo of him with the words “In Memoriam” underneath.

Alex Manes died in 2011, during Operation New Dawn. He didn’t want to believe it when he’d felt the world pitch dizzyingly, he didn’t want to believe it when Maria gave him _that look_ and he didn’t want to believe it when he googled the casualty list and saw a picture of Alex’s face on a website honouring the fallen. 

Maria had come out from around the bar giving Michael a clear view of the wall. _In Memoriam_ it said. _Alex Manes, May 30 1991 - July 6th 2011_ it said. _Forever will you be missed_ it said. He’d grabbed for his phone frantically, pulling it out of the tailored pocket of his jeans and scrambled to search google, and when Google confirmed that Alex Manes had died, an unfortunate casualty of war, that the town had mourned him - rallying around Jesse Manes and the rest of Alex’s family - the world had whited out, a high pitched ringing in his ears like the echo of the blast that had taken Alex’s life away from him.

She’d put her hands on his upper arms, thumbs brushing over the fabric as she held him firmly, waiting for him to come back into the room with concern etched across her face in a way that made Michael’s skin crawl. He could feel the warm press of her ring against his upper arm and he remembers Rosa in the Crashdown - _Holly’s with Mimi_ \- and he drags his eyes to look up at her as that same hand cups his face, brushes over his cheek and then through his hair. 

He didn’t hear what she said, something about calling Max, or Isobel. Something about knowing this is a hard time of year for him, that it’s hard for everyone but they always forget how raw it feels for him, that they don’t celebrate the 4th anymore because it feels like a betrayal when his grief’s still so raw and Michael wondered how he’d missed that it was nearly fucking Independence Day. Something laced with _I’m sorry_ and _It’ll be okay_ and he wondered how often this dance has been done. How often one of his friends has held onto his arms and pushed their fingers through his hair and held him while he cried. How often Mikey - because that’s what they all fucking call him here - had gone to Anne Evans and let her hug his sorrow away, embraced and protected and _loved_ by a mom who cried at the recollection of the day that he called her that. How often they’ve all come together to protect him from himself. 

She pulled him into a hug, kissed his temple and told him she’d call him a cab to take him home but the world roared back into focus at the word ‘home’, outrage coursing through him because how the fuck could he go _home_ if there’s never the chance of him seeing Alex again? If he can never tell Alex that he loves him and that he’s sorry and that- that he’s the force that’s kept Michael’s world spinning since the first time they’d met? How the fuck was he supposed to go ‘home’ to a place that he didn’t recognise, surrounded by certificates on the wall that call him ‘Dr Evans, PhD’ and surfaces littered with letters to ‘Professor Evans’ and this isn’t _his_ life. 

The lights overhead had exploded, Michael’s powers unleashing in a violent move that blew the yellow-tinged lights in the ceiling and caused three bottles behind the bar to pop, their contents pouring dramatically all over the counter. Maria had jumped, turned on the spot and looked around to see what might have happened and Michael had used that moment to detangle himself from her and flee out of the Pony. 

Her shouts of his name had bounced off the walls as he’d literally run out into the parking lot into the late-afternoon heat and fallen to his knees. Dust particles and small stones vibrated on the spot as he focused to bring his powers back into himself, tries to remember how to fucking breathe and suck air into his lungs even though they feel like their caving into the hole in his chest, a gaping, vast black hole that’s robbing everything from him. It isn’t real, it _can’t be real_ and Michael had balled his hand into a fist, punched the ground and felt the pain rock through his knuckles, rock up his arm and shudder into his shoulder. It laced around his mind like a balm but also like a bucket of ice-water because even in his worst nightmares - where he relives being branded by a priest and having his hand smashed by Jesse Manes - the pain’s always a phantom. It’s never _real_. 

The realisation ricocheted through him.

This is real.

This is real.

_This is real._

***

He isn’t sure what had propelled him to run back home. Well, to the place that he’d woken up. As he literally explodes through the door, wild and desperate, Michael knows he just needs to check again. That’s how facts work; you check and you check and you check. You re-run the numbers over and over because if you repeat something enough times and it doesn’t change then it’s a fact. It’s reality.

He hasn’t repeated this enough yet, there are still too many variables. There’s still a fucking chance that Alex could be alive and he hasn’t just sauntered into a perfect fucking nightmare. Because what good is having friends and doctorate and a family and the fucking surname a part of him longed to have for most of his life if he didn’t have Alex? 

He restlessly moved through the house; started in the kitchen. He pulled open the drawers and tore open the mail. There were letters to Dr Evans, talking about research grants. Thank you cards to Professor Evans ( _for helping me ace my astrophysics exam, you’re the best! 505-555-9485 x_ ) by the dozen. Letters from scientific academic boards and research publishers. Birthday cards going back years in one particular drawer that, even in his desperation, Michael spent half an hour pouring over. 

The kitchen was well stocked; there was food in the refrigerator and bottled water at the bottom. Not a beer or spirit in sight. He had a skillet and a whole bunch of other cooking paraphernalia that, at any other time, Michael would have delighted in categorising, would have taken the time to work out how to use each piece to cook something delicious. Popular to contrary belief, he didn’t exist on take-out and shitty food because he couldn’t cook, but good food was expensive and Michael didn’t have the facilities in his Airstream to do it justice. So bad food was what he ate and he spent the rest of his money on booze because that dulled even the most roaring of empty bellies.

The lounge wasn’t pristine - Michael was pretty sure that his counterpart had one of those lives where he was too busy using that big brain of his to change the world to worry too much about keeping things orderly - but it was comfortable. A soft, brown leather couch sits in front of an enormous television set and littered on the table are nerd documentaries that, where Michael in a better frame of mind, he’d have definitely wanted to sit down and binge-watch. 

He rakes his fingers through his hair again and keeps moving, distracted only by the pictures that line the walls. There are dozens of them; pictures of the ‘Evans triplets’ as kids with skinned knees and toothy grins, pictures of Max mooning after Liz, pictures of Kyle Valenti knock-kneed and adorable at nine or ten with a younger Alex Ma- _fuck_. 

The breath rushes out of him in the time it takes for his heart to beat once, the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings, the instantaneous quasi-second of separation between photons as they exist barely simultaneously without each other before they realign and share space-time together. 

There’s a whole album filled with photos of Alex. It’s on a shelf where every book on either side of it has a fine layer of dust on the wood in front. Each book has a fine layer of dust on the spine. But not Alex’s book. The book with Alex’s name printed in black lettering along the spine is immaculate and the space in front of it on the shelf is clear like the dust’s never had a chance to settle because the album’s always moving.

Michael doesn’t hesitate as he reaches out and pulls the album out along a well-worn path, settling it into his hands and feeling his heart fracturing, catching himself against the wall with one shoulder as he looks through the perfect childhood and teenage years he never got to have with Alex. The perfect relationship he never got to explore because the smiling man with his arms looped over both of their shoulders in this picture took it away from them both.

And, in that moment, he hates _Mikey_ for having not appreciated Alex enough that he still fucking left Roswell.

***

He crashes through the rest of the house like a hurricane. Drawers are upended, he even looks inside the couch cushions, flicks through dozens of yellow legal pads with a familiar scrawled handwriting lining the pages unevenly. He sees a long, complex looking mathematical equation hastily scribbled on a whiteboard and he recognises part of it; quantum mechanics is one of the many fields he’s interested in, but it doesn’t support or disprove his current hypothesis so he files it away to look at it later, like the documentaries on the table.

He rubs at his aching hand absently, booted feet taking the stairs two at a time. He’s looked everywhere downstairs, other than the pictures of Alex on the wall, and a family photo with him in on the mantle above the antique fireplace (the other him is such a fucking nerd and Michael hates that he loves how this place looks, he loves it so much and he wants it for himself), there’s nothing.

It has to be upstairs.

The guest room isn't quite as barren as he’d been expecting it to be. There’s a bed, of course, and rudimentary furniture; a wardrobe and a chest of drawers but none of it looks used. Not really. It’s there should guests ever want to stay but the wardrobe’s empty and the chest of drawers are, too. There’s no hidden compartment anywhere which is more disappointing than it has any right to be.

He picks his way through the bathroom, the empty room that doesn’t have a use as far as he can tell and into the en-suite attached to the master. Mikey’s place is nice. It’s big, bigger than anything Michael could ever dream of affording, and it’s on two floors which he’s always thought of as a big deal. Most places are sprawling ground-floor houses, like Max’s, but there are expensive AC units strategically placed through the house and Michael wonders since he’s human here, apparently, if his counterpart runs cold or if running warm is a universal constant.

The bedroom’s the same way he left it; it’s not in pieces but it’s not clean or tidy. There’s a chair that’s clearly designated for clothes, piled high with items that are… well, fuck he doesn’t know if they’re clean or dirty but there’s a laundry basket by the comfortable-looking chair that he figures they’re probably clean. There’s a Stephen Hawking book on the bedside table, along with a pair of reading glasses and the whole room just feels… right. Like, if Michael was to live in this kind of place, have this kind of life, this is what it’d be like. 

His fingers push through his hair and he resumes his search; he can’t focus too long on the star chart on the ceiling above the bed or the old-style nautical maps on the walls. He can’t focus for too long on the high-resolution, framed photographs of beautifully bright and colourful nebulae that are by the window. He can’t even look at the- No, he can.

There’s a photo sticking out of the edge of the book. Not giving a single shit that it means Mikey’ll lose his place, Michael reaches out and pulls it free carefully. He wishes he hadn’t. 

The photo itself is a polaroid. It’s faded and dog-eared, the edges curled slightly at the bottom from where it got damp. The image is maybe a decade old, he recognises the lightness in Alex’s profile. They’re standing together in the photo, grinning at each other with a blinding brilliance. Alex’s left hand is pressed against Mikey’s cheek, cupping his jaw and they’re lost in each other. Michael knows how that feels, to be the centre-point of Alex’s world. He knows how addictive that feeling is, when the world narrows down to a single point and it’s just… them. He wets his lower lip, running his thumb along Alex’s smile before his eyes fall to look at his hand.

There’s a silver band on the ring finger of Alex’s hand.

Had they gotten-

Michael’s head spins and he sits down heavily on the bed, feeling the wooden slats grunting beneath him in protest.

***

He doesn’t mean to find the box. Well, he meant to find it but the way in which he found it hadn’t been what he’d intended. He doesn’t know how long he’s stared at the picture, a sickening, swirling nausea in his stomach that’s something like jealousy and grief and anger. It doesn’t feel good, and when he went to put the picture back into the book - he couldn’t look at it anymore - he knocked off a paperweight from the bedside table which rolls under the bed.

Sliding off the bed and onto his knees, Michael reached under the bed to retrieve the paperweight and that’s when he saw the box. It came out with the paperweight.

That’s how he’s ended up sitting on a stranger’s bed with a memory box on his lap, lid half open and paperweight carefully back in its place. 

He blows out a breath and lifts the lid off properly, having spent far too long putting it off by admiring the box. It’s wood, mahogany he thinks from the rich colour, and it’s elegant. There’s silver inlay embedded along the top in interlocking squares and rectangles and there’s a keyhole but Michael doesn’t think this thing has ever been locked. Not from the way the varnish is slightly worn along the sides, not from the way there’s a worry groove in the wood in the bottom left corner of the lid. 

Inside, the lining’s a deep midnight blue. It’s soft, velvety to the touch and Michael hates it on instinct because he knows it’s there to protect something precious. It doesn’t take him long to see what’s so precious it needs a special box.

There are two rings, silver in colour, and Michael knows without touching them that the one with a slight red-stain on it is Alex’s. He doesn’t touch it, but the other one slides onto his finger and fits perfectly. There’s a small groove in it, as he takes it off quickly enough that it stings his skin. He figures the chain inside belongs to the ring, too, that Mikey probably wore it around his neck like a noose for longer than he should have done after Alex died. There are other things in the box too; movie ticket stubs, wrists from a music festival they were VIPs at. There’s a letter, too, folded and unfolded so many times it looks fragile and Michael lifts it out, carefully unfurling the pages.

He can’t read it fully. What he skims is painful enough.

> _I really hate it out here, I can’t wait to come home. Just three more years and I’ll be done and I can go back to civilian life … I miss you so much you have no idea. I’ll be home in two weeks on leave, can we just not see other people for at least four days this time? … I’ll see you soon, can’t wait. I love you, M_

He folds the letter up again and closes his eyes for a moment, even as he reaches back into the box, fingers snagging on cool, beaded metal.

His gaze snaps open and he watches with a sort of disassociated horror as, hanging in front of him are Alex’s dog-tags, stained like the ring. 

Everything in the room explodes, quite literally, in a whirlwind of chaos and pain and Michael shuts everything back into the box and slams it shut, feet taking him out of the house again and into the late afternoon heat, entropy swirling his sanity around the fucking drain, clinging desperately to the event horizon.

He needs to go home.

***

There’s a sticky, unpleasant, _might_ heat in the bunker. He’s used to feeling warm down here, the fans are from the 1940s and often just wheeze the warm air right back into it, but the air’s musty and stuffy and it’s as though the fans haven’t been used since its creation and he’s been down here for hours with shaking, aching hands and his pulse roaring in his ears. There’s no power down here, no lovingly restored electrical circuits or retro lights that hang unevenly with oversized light bulbs. It’s dusty and dim and the fading light that’s filtering in from the open hatch isn’t enough to really light up the room but Michael knows that this isn’t his bunker.

This isn’t where he belongs.

This isn’t his _place_. 

He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong in a world where Alex Manes died at twenty. He doesn’t belong in a world where he was adopted by the Evans’ and raised as an important member of a family that looked down their noses at him even as he skinned his knees with Max and Isobel from the age of eleven, as inseparable as the system would let them be. He doesn’t belong here with PhDs and Professorships and friends that send him cards with space-puns inside. Even if it looks perfect on the surface, the fact still remains that even here, even here where he had Alex for longer than he ever dreamed he might have done, he still lost him. 

He doesn’t belong in a world where Alex Manes fucking _died_ at twenty.

***

By the time Michael’s stopped spiralling (stopped is a strong word; Michael doesn’t think he’s ever going to stop spiralling under the fucking circumstances) about Alex’s untimely demise, it’s dark outside. Really dark. His cell phone’s flashing with over twenty missed calls; Max and Isobel, Liz and Maria, Rosa. Fuck, even _Valenti_ has been calling him. There are two calls from his - _Mikey’s_ \- mom and a text message that just says _If you need anything, you know where I am. Love Mom x_.

He turns it off. 

The phone’s as much a mockery of this place as the fact that Alex is gone. If Michael disappeared dramatically, holed himself up in the Airstream for a week, no one would look for him. He knows that. He’s used to that. What he might have had with Maria - something that could have been light and beautiful and bright - was nothing but smouldering embers. His life’s a mess of immovable objects being slammed into by unstoppable forces. He’s tired of breaking the things he wants. He’s tired of being alone. He’s tired of hurting with every inward breath and the ragged realisation that he’s not stuck in a nightmare, that this is fucking reality, is just the final nail in the coffin, the knuckle-duster clad punchline to the joke of his life.

He shifts so his back’s resting against the cold concrete of the wall, feeling the chill prickling over his skin. It’s reassuring, but that’s the only thing it is. He misses his Airstream, he misses his truck. He misses the way Isobel rolls her eyes when he speaks and she always finds a way to brush her fingers over his knee or shoulder before she leaves. He misses the way that Max shows he cares with self-indulgent lectures. He misses the way Maria looks at him half like he disgusts her and half like she truly enjoys being around him. He misses the way Valenti always has something snarky to say. But most of all he fucking misses Alex.

He’s spent so long trying to avoid how he feels, trying to avoid what he thought he didn’t want, to tell himself he’s stuck in nostalgia and clinging to a time when everything wasn’t royally fucked seven ways from Sunday, when the reality is that all he’s ever wanted is _Alex_. He wanted Alex when he was a scrawny teenager with eye-liner and handcuff necklaces and when Michael didn’t know what that feeling was that meant he just couldn’t drag his eyes away from the other teen. He wanted Alex when he was wide-eyed and afraid that last time Michael saw him straight after basic before he shipped off that first time and when he was bruised and aching with a shadow in his eyes as he came home after that first deployment and fell into Michael’s arms with a _please_ but was a shadow and a cooling spot on the bed in the morning. After every time he’d watched Alex walk away - _I hate to see you go but I love to watch you leave_ \- and he’d had to deal with the crippling pain of feeling like he wasn’t enough, he’s only ever wanted Alex.

He’s lied to himself about it, tried to wrap Alex in the pain of everything when in reality Alex was his first home. The first person to try and show him genuine kindness when he didn’t have to. The first person to make Michael feel like he _belonged_ and fear drove him away. He’s a liar if he says that the beating of his heart doesn’t spell out Alex’s name in morse-code, that the stardust running through his veins is intangibly linked to the stardust running in Alex’s. They’re made of the same stuff; carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, building blocks of life even though they’re from different worlds - literally. A part of him lives inside of Alex, and has done since the very first time they met and Alex had raised his eyebrow and introduced himself with a firm handshake and a _fuck you, Valenti_ as the first comment of many was thrown his way. 

It’s been less than twenty-four hours and he misses home.

He rakes his hands through his hair and then drops his head back, ignoring the creeping chill he can feel scrambling over his skin, telling him to leave and find somewhere warm. The days are hot in New Mexico but the nights get cold. This one’s going to be no exception. He doesn’t move other than to stretch his legs out in front of him and dig his right thumb into the back of his left hand, just underneath the knuckles, where they ached from his attempts to prove this was a dream.

“What now, Guerin?” he asks himself, closing his eyes and breathing through his nose, trying to think back to the night before. The night before he woke up in a strange fucking bed in a strange fucking life. It’s hard, it’s hard because he can’t think past the screaming silence where Isobel and Max’s presence should be, even though Max’s has been dulled and silent for weeks now and Isobel’s bright like a beacon. He can’t think past the roaring grief at the loss of something that should have been perfect but he ruined it. He can’t think past the echo of a smile at a drive-in and one perfect moment of _you stayed_ before reality crashed down on them and the look on Maria’s face when she told him _that’s not funny, Michael_.

He picks at his jeans, frustrated when he can’t find the odd loose thread to pluck at - another reminder that everything here’s fucking wrong because these jeans look like ones Max would wear, $75 at least and tailored and yeah they’re comfortable but they’re not _him_. 

“How do you get yourself home?”

Opening his eyes and staring into the swallowing pitch of the disused bunker, he taps his fingers against the floor.

“How the fuck did you get here?”

He thinks about the night before; he remembers that he was here - well, he was over _there_ if he’s being honest in his re-creation, between the central table and the beat-up mattress he has for those nights when he just can’t leave well enough alone - and he was working on something Alex had found and ‘liberated’ from the Air Force base that had cropped up overnight on the old Foster ranch. Overnight was probably an exaggeration but there had been a lot going on over the last twelve months, including but not limited to Alex coming home, Alex breaking his heart, Isobel finding out that her husband was a murderous brain-riding alien, a massive government conspiracy, Jesse Manes, Caulfield, Max being some kind of god, Rosa coming back and Max being dead, so he’s been too preoccupied to keep tabs on what the fucking government is-

He’s getting off track. 

Michael’s whole being itches for a drink, something rich and woody laced with acetone. Something to just numb it all down a little. He knows it won’t calm the storm - it never has - but it can help remind him not to care, even for a short period. The reprieve from Giving A Shit is something he often finds himself desperate for. He still hasn’t really forgiven his brain for deciding that music is also inextricably linked with Alex because the first time he played guitar in over a decade, in front of Maria, the face he saw behind closed eyes wasn’t hers and the raging vortex of his entropy stilled for a split second before it raged again in the shape of Alex’s smile and the realisation that he’d told Alex to _come back tomorrow, okay? We’ll talk_. 

But none of this is helping him, and he knows that. That’s just the way things are; he kicks himself when he’s down as much as the universe likes to do the same.

> _I’ll see you soon, can’t wait. I love you, M_

He pushes himself to his feet and paces around the empty space, the fucking letter haunting him as much as the rest of the contents of that box, a mockery of a life he could have had - a life he’d have fucking craved if only it hadn’t ended so tragically. The sound of his footfall echoes, bouncing off the walls. It feels bigger than his bunker, even though he knows - realistically - they’re the same size. This one’s just empty. Empty and dark and impersonal. He thinks - briefly - about turning the phone back on, asking everyone to just leave him alone to grieve in peace. He thinks they’d let him, at least for the next twenty-four hours. Knowing that tomorrow is the actual anniversary is hard, even though he knows he saw Alex a week ago. Even though _his Alex_ is alive.

His boots kick up dust and he knocks his hip on an old table, a piece of equipment from the Cold War that he recognises by touch. It’s even in the same place, here. Caving and turning his phone back on - but only for the torch - it buzzes a few more times with increasing urgency, Max and Isobel have called him a dozen more times between them and fuck, he thinks, how does _Mikey_ (he can’t shake the vague disgust with which he thinks that name) handle having people so protective and invested? There’s only a small part of him that craves that kind of acceptance and care (he’s still lying to himself but right now he doesn’t fucking care). 

In the amber-white circle of the cell phone torch, the bunker looks as desolate as he expected it to. He thinks about the empty space where his console should be and where he had been working on the device.

The device.

 _Fuck_.

He’d actually had no idea what it would do, but he distinctly remembered releasing a panel and pushing some numbers into it, something that he thought might have been a start-up sequence based on the information Alex had managed to pass along to him. He remembers it shimmering and… not much else, if he’s totally honest. He tapped in the sequence and it reacted and then just shut down. Disappointed, he’d slumped over to the cot and drank away the loneliness that bit into him with a ferocity that it hadn’t done for a while. 

He rubs his hand over his face and doesn’t think about what might be happening at home. Doesn’t think about how no one’s probably noticed that he’s missing because he’s been living in self-imposed isolation for the better part of three weeks and even though someone keeps leaving food for him at the Airstream so he doesn’t starve (Isobel, probably), no one’s really checking in on him. It’s easier that way, he tells himself. It’s easier that way because if no one cares - and if he doesn’t care - then no one else can be let down by his colossal fuck-ups. He can’t hurt Alex more than he already has, he can’t hurt Maria more than he has. He can’t- He can’t _help_ Liz bring Max back. He’s no good to anyone right now and he knows that. Doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Doesn’t make it feel any less painful that he’s stuck here, in a world without Alex, where he’s a stranger in his own life and surrounded by love and acceptance that he doesn’t deserve. The concern in the buzzing of text messages and voicemails tells him more than anything else is a reminder that these aren’t his family. They look like them, they sound like them, but they’re not his Max and Isobel. They’re not his Liz and Kyle, not his Rosa and Ma- Maria. 

The irony of it all doesn’t escape him; he’s spent his entire life wanting to get away, to get somewhere _better_ and now, objectively, he’s found that place and all he wants is to go home.

He wants to go home but without the device, without knowing how to undo what he’s done, without being able to fix it, he’s stuck here, with no way of getting back, with no way of telling his siblings that he- no way of telling them that he doesn’t hate them. With no way of seeing Alex again and- And-

The broken sound that escapes him - sounding a lot like a sob - bounces off the walls and into the empty space as Michael hides his face in his hands and sinks to the floor again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's commented, cheerleaded and left kudos so far, I adore you all <3


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He wishes he could face-time his mom now, that he could tell her that he’s freaking out because he’s about to talk to Alex Manes again for the first time in eight years, seven months and two days. He wishes he could get a pep talk and a gentle smack on the back from Max. He wishes he had something to do with his hands that didn’t involve fiddling with the hem of the t-shirt he’d bought after Alex had left the Wild Pony with what little money was in Guerin’s wallet and jean pockets. He’d rather have bought a new wardrobe, cleaned himself up a little more than he’d been able to, but he knows that he’s limited. So here he stands, showered and shaved in a new t-shirt and the slightly ill-fitting, uncomfortable jeans with an ostentatious belt buckle securing them on his hips._

Mikey’s palms are sweating. He hasn’t felt this nervous since he’d been a guest speaker at UC Irvine five years back or so. He’d had to change outfits three separate times then; the fabric had been wrong, he’d sweated through the first shirt he’d worn… It wasn’t until he face-timed his mom that he’d been able to calm down enough to actually go out and give the presentation he’d written himself and talk on a panel of his peers and friends. He wishes he could face-time his mom now, that he could tell her that he’s freaking out because he’s about to talk to Alex Manes again for the first time in eight years, seven months and two days. He wishes he could get a pep talk and a gentle smack on the back from Max. He wishes he had something to do with his hands that didn’t involve fiddling with the hem of the t-shirt he’d bought after Alex had left the Wild Pony with what little money was in Guerin’s wallet and jean pockets. He’d rather have bought a new wardrobe, cleaned himself up a little more than he’d been able to, but he knows that he’s limited. So here he stands, showered and shaved in a new t-shirt and the slightly ill-fitting, uncomfortable jeans with an ostentatious belt buckle securing them on his hips.

He pushes his hand through his hair once more for good measure and shakes his arms out in the way his mom taught him when he was younger as a way of handling his anxiety before he lifts his hand - still trembling slightly, fingers curled inward towards his palm - to knock on the door.

He knows he’s earlier than Alex had said to be but- 

Well. He hopes Alex won’t hold it against him.

***

“A-Alex?”

The world dropped out around Mikey, everything pushed past him in a dizzying rush. He didn’t have time to categorise the discomfort on Maria’s face because he was too busy focusing on the way that Alex’s face fell. How he finished his beer in two long swallows - his throat worked in a way that was utterly mesmerising - and slid off his stool. 

“Yeah, Guerin,” he said after a moment and his voice was so alive. Mikey could barely breathe, the world felt like an explosion of colour and oxygen, which was almost too much to handle having lived in a monochromatic vacuum since the love of his life died and all the joy was stripped from the world. “You don’t have the monopoly on drinking your feelings.”

Mikey blinked, still overwhelmed by the sight in front of him to really, truly, comprehend the hurt in Alex’s voice, the pain wrapped around the words. All he could see was Alex, radiant, beautiful, _alive_ Alex. He was older, of course he was older, but he still looked good. God, he looked good. His clothes clung to all the right parts of him, his hair looked just as soft as Mikey remembered it to look. The twitch of the muscles in his jaw, the curve of his neck that Mikey could vividly remember hiding his face in the last time they-

He was in Alex’s space before he even realised. He’d closed the distance with three long strides to just touch him again and he’d completely forgotten himself. That this wasn’t _his_ Alex. His hands were outstretched, ready to push under the leather and twist in the soft blue fabric of the sweater at the small of Alex’s back, to pull him in close and hide his nose against Alex’s temple and close his eyes and every known universe would be immediately put back to rights. 

He was so close, centimetres away and he could already feel Alex pressed against his chest, when reality slapped him in the face. Alex had gotten to his feet and was moving away, hand raised in the universal signal of _stop_. The expression on his face was somewhere between dismayed and confused and he was shaking his head. Mikey felt his mouth opening but Alex’s fingers curled into his palm, leaving the index one raised.

“Stop.” 

Mikey, having never been good at denying Alex anything, went still. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” 

His throat had stopped working; he knew Alex was waiting for an answer for him but the New Mexico desert had crawled into his throat and was stealing any moisture his body actually had to help his lips not stick to his teeth. He could feel his brain drying out, seventy-five percent water and every single percent had suddenly vanished at the look on Alex’s face.

Alex didn’t want to be touched. Alex didn’t want to be touched by _him_. Mikey felt the monochromatic discolouration of loss creeping into the edges of his vision.

“I just-” 

“You just what, Guerin?” Alex’s voice was cold. Detached. Mikey had never heard that tone before but he knew he never wanted to again. His fingers itched to reach out and touch Alex, the same way they always did - muscle memory never truly faded and the desire to touch Alex was like riding a bike. Seeing Alex alive should have been enough, seeing Alex and breathing the same air as him but- but it would never be enough. Mikey had never had the self-control to see a chocolate cake and not immediately bury his face into it. Alex was better than any kind of baked goods.

Alex looked… good. Definitely good, but also tired. There was a line on his forehead - no, wait, a _scar_ \- and Mikey wondered what had happened to give him that. To make him stand slightly unevenly on the ground, favouring his left leg. Mikey watched the way he subtly shifted his weight so he wasn’t leaning too heavily on his right foot. Was he hurt? He felt concern flicker over his face but Alex wasn’t having any of it.

“Guerin.” The way that name fell off Alex’s tongue was clipped, exhausted, frustrated. There was affection there, too, but it was buried so deeply that Mikey could barely hear it. Layers and layers of protection stood between him and Alex, a shield behind his eyes that made him almost unreadable. 

“You’re alive.” 

It was quite possibly the stupidest thing he could have said in that moment if the way that Alex’s (perfect, God, were they always so perfect?) eyebrows climbed up towards his hairline. He wanted the earth to swallow him whole at the expression he caught on Maria’s face in his peripheral vision and the way Alex’s eyes looked him up and down without an ounce of heat there. He watched as Alex folded his arms over his chest and leaned his weight onto his heels. He watched the defensive posture ripple up like nano-tech armour crawling over Alex and shutting him down further, further out of Mikey’s reach.

“You were expecting something else?” Alex asked and there was a _tone_. Mikey didn’t like the way Alex looked at him, critical and suspicious, making him feel flayed to the core, open and exposed; a raw nerve at the mercy of the elements. His emotions whipped around him with dizzying, painful, speed and Mikey struggled to explain.

“I-”

“Look-”

“Can we talk?” Mikey asked at the same time that Alex said: “How much have you had to drink today?”

They looked at each other for a moment, Mikey vaguely horrified (though considering the airstream and the bottles and bottles of alcohol he had woken up surrounded by, he shouldn’t be surprised) and Alex disbelieving. 

“Nothing,” Mikey retorted at the same time that Alex said, “Oh, so _now_ you wanna talk?”

They both said, at the same time, “ _What_?”

Alex lifted his hand, cutting Mikey off from them having a repeat of speaking at the same time and Mikey closed his mouth obediently, fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt anxiously. The sensation of the fabric being twisted between his fingers had helped settle him a little, but it wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough. 

“Look, Guerin, I don’t know what you want-”

“-to talk-”

“-or how much you’ve had to drink today-”

“- _nothing_ , Alex, will you just _list-_ ”

“-but the Pony isn’t the right place for this conversation. Sober up, Guerin, and come by the cabin. Three hours oughta be enough time.” He didn’t ask, and Mikey had never known an Alex who had looked at him with the cool expectation of compliance to the order. 

There was a pause and it hung heavy in the air, Mikey watched Alex’s chin tip up defiantly, like he was expecting an argument, so when Mikey just nodded once and looked away, eyes darting to the counter, to Maria, to the floor and then back to Alex, the other man was surprised.

“Okay,” Mikey said, aloud, just to reinforce the point. “I- yeah. Okay.”

Alex wet his lower lip and Mikey felt that pull again, that need to close ranks around Alex and protect him from whatever had made those walls come up, spiky and high and seemingly impenetrable. Alex had just nodded and started walking away and when Maria poured him a single shot of tequila with a look somewhere between hurt and upset on her face, it didn’t occur to resident genius, Michael Evans, PhD, that maybe _he_ was the cause of those walls.

***

The wait for Alex to open the door is agonising. Mikey tries not to think about the reasons as to why Alex is living all the way out here but, from what little he’s managed to work out about this reality, he can’t help it and none of them are good. He pushes his fingers through his hair and thinks about knocking again but the minutes are passing like a kidney stone (not from experience, but he was subjected in excruciating detail to the story of his dad’s a few years back and that kind of graphic storytelling leaves a mark on a person) and there’s no sound from inside. 

Actually, he realises, there _are_ sounds from inside but he wasn’t expecting the shuffle of feet or the grumbling, or the barking-growl from a dog. The sounds were less confident than he’d expected, less sure. It’s taking Alex longer to get to the door than Mikey would have expected and his mind’s already running away with reasons as to why Alex lives all the way out here so by the time the door swings open, Mikey’s ready to collapse in relief that Alex is actually in one piece.

Except-

Except Alex _isn’t_ in one piece. And Alex looks exceptionally pissed off that Mikey’s standing on the other side of the door, mouth open - _agape_ as he looks at Alex like he’s never seen him before. To be fair to Mikey, he _hasn’t_ seen Alex looking like this before, in a white cable-knit sweater with his hair in perfectly mussed disarray. There’s a pair of glasses sitting on his face and Mikey wants to lean in and kiss him until they’re wonky. He’s got- he’s got a crutch underneath his right armpit, knuckles white as he grips onto it and suddenly Mikey realises why Alex was standing awkwardly in the Wild Pony.

He’s done enough work with veterans that he should have noticed it immediately, but he was so busy looking at Alex that everything else sort of faded into the background. His gaze drops and he sees the black sweatpants that Alex is wearing knotted underneath his right knee and the pit drops out of his stomach. Mikey sees the way Alex’s body leans into the crutch like he’s more than used to using it when he doesn’t have his prosthetic on, the way that his shoulder hitches up slightly with the pressure. The way his fingers, tight around the handle, wrap around it with ease. The crutch - a Y crutch, his brain helpfully supplies - has padding at the top, to ease the pressure. He wonders if Alex has bars in the shower and by the bed, if he has a glider to get him around in the middle of the night. He wonders how a place like this, Sheriff Jim Valenti’s hunting cabin, is even remotely accessible for someone with mobility needs. Why does Alex have mobility needs?

For his part, Alex looks irritated, a slight scowl on his face and a crease in his forehead that highlights the scar Mikey wants to rub his thumb over and smooth away. 

“You’re early,” Alex says, somewhere between off-guard and cross and Mikey remembers that, even as a teenager, Alex hated being caught off-guard. He’d forgotten about that, nostalgia and rose-tinted shades tend to wear down the rougher edges of memory. His head’s tilted to the side like he’s solving a particularly complex puzzle and Mikey isn’t entirely sure how he feels about it. He feels like Alex is sizing him up, puzzling him out. Alex leans his weight back on one foot and Mikey shifts awkwardly, not missing the way that Alex’s eyes zero in on the way he’s anxiously fiddling with the hem of his shirt. He stops, immediately.

“I- yeah, I’m sorry, Alex, I just- I can…” he gestures over his shoulder, “I can come back?”

Alex’s eyebrows lift and Mikey feels like a fool. 

“You came all this way, Guerin,” he says, backing up a little and his gait’s uneven. A lemon and white beagle peeks out from behind Alex’s leg and she lets out a huff that sounds somewhere between a bark and a howl. Alex looks down at her, surprised, before she skitters away from the front door and into her crate. “She-”

“I’ve never- I mean, I really like dogs,” Mikey says, unable to stop his lips from curling up a little. “But they- I just- they never seem to like me.”

Alex looks at him again and moves away from the door. Mikey feels like he’s been rumbled.

“You better come in.”

***

“You- uh, you better come in?” Mikey had said to Hunter Manes.

The visit had been unexpected; Mikey went over to the Manes house once every couple of weeks for lunch with Jesse, who was suffering from a little bit of empty nest syndrome now that his sons had all gone off to fight for their country in his stead. He knew his mom and dad had taken to inviting Jesse, Mimi and the Valentis over, as all of their children had now fled the nest (even if he hadn’t gone all that far; Liz and Max had gone travelling before settling down so that Liz could go to college and Isobel had decided to go to New York of all places, but Mikey loved home too much to go so far that he couldn’t just drive home every weekend), but since Jesse Manes would one day be his father-in-law, Mikey figured it wouldn’t have hurt to make a little more effort. There was something about the way that Hunter’s expression shifted, crumpling slightly, that made Mikey want to reach out and proactively comfort him. Maybe something had happened to Flint? 

Hunter raked his fingers through his hair, a habit all of the Manes men had in common when they were anxious or trying to calm themselves down, and Mikey just closed the door after Hunter had stepped inside. His skin was glistening, droplets of the misty rain clinging to his skin. He didn’t look drenched, but then this kind of rain only brushed over a person and made them look dewy. 

“Hunter?”

Hunter blew out a breath, fingers laced against the back of his neck and Mikey felt his pulse spiking in alarm at how Harlan’s twin caught the crook of his elbow and guided him down to sit on the couch. Mikey’s heart set up shop in his throat, the sorrow settling on Hunter’s face made him think that someone had _died_. 

He hit the couch hard. He sat down heavily, feeling the lumpy cushions of the IKEA standard UNM furniture underneath his thighs. He laced his fingers together and then started to pluck at his jeans, watching Hunter pacing back and forth made him feel sea-sick and he cleared his throat, trying to dislodge his pulse, trying to dislodge the fear that had gripped him that it wasn’t Harlan that Hunter was here about. That it wasn’t Flint that Hunter was here about.

It was- He was-

 _Alex_.

Baleful brown eyes met his own and Mikey’s pulse started roaring in his ears.

“No.”

He got to his feet, stumbling over himself, he needed to move, to do _something_. Hunter reached out to try and steady him, but Mikey pushed his hands away, catching his knee on the edge of the table. Tears stung at his eyes.

“ _No._.” 

“Mikey-”

“I said no, Hunter. Jesus- no, it- it can’t- you’re- he- no, he’s _fine_ ,” Mikey’s voice cracked. “He’s _fine_ because he’s coming ho-home in a couple of weeks and he just- he _just wrote to me_ , and he- he’s-”

“We got the call yesterday,” Hunter said, calmer than he had any right to be. How could he be so calm? How could he be so _goddamned_ calm when Mikey’s world was crumbling around him? There was a buzzing in his ears, tinnitus. A shock response, he knew, disorientation from the way that he was hiccupping breaths into his lungs, mind deoxygenating because he wasn’t actually taking in anything useful with the gasped gulps of air, vertigo was pulling at the edges of his brain causing his vision to swim slightly, his pulse hammering in Alex’s name as though that defiance would somehow change the truth. “Mikey-”

Hunter caught his upper arms and stilled him, pulling his hands from where they’d twisted in his hair, trying to ground himself somehow, some way, trying to induce a sharp pain to prove to himself that this wasn’t real. That this was just some kind of nightmare and Alex was fine. Alex was fine- Alex was fine- Alex was-

“There was an attack, his convoy was hit with an IED. He-” Hunter’s voice wavered, “-he didn’t make it. They- they’ll be sending him home.”

“No,” Mikey shook his head. Everything sounded like it was underwater, Hunter was telling him about the arrangements, when Alex’s body would be coming home in a flag-draped coffin, landing at a nearby airbase and driven home to Roswell but he could barely hear anything past the supernova in his chest collapsing in on itself, atoms ripped apart in rapid process but, here, nothing would be reformed from the ashes of the aftermath. Something inside him was breaking, imploding. 

“Mikey, I- I’m so sorry I-”

Mikey grabbed Hunter’s arms, white-knucked and probably painful but he couldn’t bring himself to even realise let alone care. The universe was spinning, the planet had ground to a halt. Sixty-seven thousand miles an hour grinding to a halt. He couldn’t keep up, he couldn’t stay upright. He couldn’t- he- 

“Please,” he said and he knew he was begging. He felt wetness on his cheeks, sorrow mirrored in Hunter’s eyes as he pulled Mikey into a hug, wrapped his arms tightly around his shoulders and Mikey’s hands dropped, fisting in the back of Hunter’s shirt. “Tell me it’s not- please- Hunter- I’m be-”

“I wish I could,” Hunter murmured, one huge hand cupping the back of Mikey’s head. Mikey felt Hunter’s chest hitch and he broke, shattered into raw shards, sobs wracking his body.

***

Alex hasn’t said anything. He’s been sat in on the couch, staring at Mikey through those dark-rimmed glasses and Mikey has done nothing but squirm under his gaze. He’s dragged himself back to the present, pulled himself out of painful memories that make tears prickle at the corner of his eyes. Wiping the back of his hand along them in a move he wishes was more subtle than it was and he knows Alex sees. He watches the crease between Alex’s eyebrows smooth out, a look of concern cross his face which is only briefly distracted by the dog barking again.

“Wentz,” he says, turning his head to look at her and she huffs at him, looking between him and Mikey with her front paws tapping impatiently on the floor. “Stop it.”

She tips her head back and howls, then starts barking again. Mikey watches Alex sigh and click his fingers once to shush her and she walks around the back of the chair, staying as far away from Mikey as she possibly could to jump up onto the couch and stretch herself obnoxiously all over it, and Alex’s lap, huffing out a breath dramatically and resting her head on Alex’s knee, wriggling a little until she’s lying on her back ears flopped upwards over his thigh. Alex responds in the appropriate manner by rubbing her belly. 

Mikey flexes his fingers and rests them on his thighs, chewing on the inside of his lip as he watches the two of them, how the beagle - Wentz (and of course Alex named his beagle after someone from Fall Out Boy, even if Mikey’s never been able to listen to a single piece of their music ever since he died) - keeps looking at him as if she’s challenging him to admit that he’s jealous of her position on Alex’s lap. 

He isn’t about to admit that she’s right. 

Even if she is.

He opens his mouth to say something, rubbing his palms together and feeling his throat closing off, rebelliously stopping him from speaking, from saying anything in response to the expectant look that Alex is giving him.

“I-”

Alex cuts him off with an arched eyebrow and says the one question Mikey isn’t sure that he has an answer for. 

“Who _are_ you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \o/?


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The question hangs in the air, waiting for an answer. Mikey can’t give one, his tongue feels too big for his mouth and the New Mexico desert’s crawled inside him again, drying him out and making it impossible for him to think, let alone speak. He’s forgotten what it feels like to be pinned by Alex’s eyes, to be cornered by a look. Alex always used to have the uncanny ability to open his mouth and make a statement that then had Mikey spilling his truths uncontrollably, bearing his soul all the damn time.
> 
> Some things, he notes, don’t change across universes, across time.

The question hangs in the air, waiting for an answer. Mikey can’t give one, his tongue feels too big for his mouth and the New Mexico desert’s crawled inside him again, drying him out and making it impossible for him to think, let alone speak. He’s forgotten what it feels like to be pinned by Alex’s eyes, to be cornered by a look. Alex always used to have the uncanny ability to open his mouth and make a statement that then had Mikey spilling his truths uncontrollably, bearing his soul all the damn time.

Some things, he notes, don’t change across universes, across time. 

“You’re really him,” is what he says finally, dumb with the disbelief that’s still crawling over his skin. He can’t believe it, not fully, not yet. He hasn’t touched Alex. He hasn’t put his hands on the person he buried eight years ago who still hadn’t quite grown into his features the way this person has. He always knew Alex would have grown up to be just as handsome, ageing like a fine wine, he wasn’t ready for it to feel so devastating. 

Alex lifts his eyebrows, rests his hands on his thighs and Mikey’s gaze drops to his leg again, the bunched up sweatpant tied in a knot under the right knee and he wants to ask but doesn’t feel like it’s appropriate. It’s inappropriate enough that he keeps staring, in all honesty, but he can’t help it. He would have loved Alex even if he’d come back in pieces but still breathing. He knows within himself he’s never stopped loving Alex. How can you stop loving the other half of yourself? 

“Guerin.”

“Evans,” Mikey corrects, almost automatically, seeing Alex’s expression flickering a little, a crack in the calm - if not slightly annoyed - expression Alex has been wearing since he arrived. “Michael Evans.” He touches his palm to his chest almost like he’s trying to communicate across languages. “That- uh that’s me. I’m- My friends call me Mikey.”

He watches Alex process this with no small amount of interest. He feels the way his body reacts to the way Alex’s eyes roll over him, curious and calculating, observing what Mikey supposes must be little changes between himself and the Michael of this world. This reality, he supposes. He doesn’t know how to explain the part of him that cries out for the distance between them to be closed. He watches Alex’s jaw tick slightly, a move Mikey knows comes from him pressing his teeth together, tongue tucked just behind his right canine; a move linked with thought, or at least, it was with his Alex.

He sees Alex’s throat working as he swallows, quiet and thoughtful as the beagle shifts on his lap, rolling over with a flurry of leg kicking to drape over his thigh protectively, eyes still watching Mikey with no small amount of distrust. She stretches her paws out so that they brush over his other thigh and then wriggles further onto his lap, which should have been cute if it weren’t a blatant display of possessiveness that gets under Mikey’s skin more than he wants to admit. 

“I-”

“Hang on.”

Alex lifts his hand and then gets to his feet, tucking his crutches under his arms. Mikey moves immediately, getting to his feet with hands outstretched, ready to catch Alex if he falls, ready to help him - to do whatever he needs to - and the sharp look he gets in response is unexpected. The “I can get-” falls off his tongue before he realises what he’s doing.

“I’ve been managing fine on my own,” he says, one hand lifting to stop Mikey in his tracks. Mikey doesn’t miss the slight wince in Alex’s face, though whether that’s a response to the pain of moving or the way Mikey felt his own expression fall as he slumps heavily back into the seat he isn’t sure. Either way, he watches Alex shuffle back out of the room and clenches his fingers against the worn fabric over the arm of the chair he’s in so he doesn’t get to his feet and rush after Alex to help when it’s obviously not needed - or wanted. 

It feels like longer than the seven and a half actual minutes that pass before Alex is back. He’s moving better, no crutches, and he has two shoes on. Mikey remembers that Alex had been barefoot when he’d opened the door and something inside him tugs when he realises that Alex isn’t comfortable enough around him to let him see him with a bare prosthesis, let alone without it on. He can’t help but wonder how badly he’s messed things up here for Alex to be so distant.

“Want a drink?” Alex asks, and Mikey nods.

“Water, please,” he says and he watches Alex’s expression shift again. He wets his lower lip, gets to his feet because he can’t just sit still when Alex is _right there_ but Alex flinches back from his touch.

Mikey follows him into the kitchen, just quickly enough to see as Alex rubs his hand over his face and breathes out heavily. 

“I-“ he doesn’t even know what he wants to say. “Alex, can I-“ his fingers twist in the hem of his shirt anxiously for lack of anything better to do with them, twisting fabric is better than reaching out and being rejected. “You don’t like me.”

The look on Alex’s face speaks volumes and Mikey feels his heart shatter.

***

“You don’t like me,” Alex paused, twisting his hematite ring around his index finger. Mikey had always loved the way the light caught on Alex’s jewellery; it was distracting, but he was of the opinion that there were worse things to be distracted by than Alex Manes’ hands.

“What?” Mikey blinked, confusion rolling off him in waves and he pushed his glasses up his nose, scrambling to his feet to stand in front of Alex who flinched back from him a little. “What do you mean I don’t like you? Of course I _like_ you, Alex, you’re my best friend.” There it was again, that little flinch. “What?”

“It’s okay,” Alex mumbled, “I get it. I- I mean, I-”

A voice in the back of Mikey’s head - that sounded a lot like Isobel’s sarcastic drawl whenever he was being an idiot teenage boy (which was a lot) - told him that this was a _Moment_ and he had to do something. 

He reached out and cupped Alex’s cheeks, cradling his face in his hands and closed the distance between their faces in an instant, pressing a quick and chaste kiss to Alex’s lips. 

“I like you,” he breathed against Alex’s mouth, “a lot.” 

Anything else he might have wanted to say, though, was lost in the moment that Alex surged forward and kissed him again, those hands sinking into Mikey’s hair and their bodies as close as was physically possible without melding into a single entity. 

It might have only been the start of something between them, something that had been a long time in the making, but Mikey knew he’d never want to kiss anyone ever again.

***

“- are hard right now.”

Mikey blinks back into the conversation, grasping for the context of Alex’s words. There’s a bottle of water on the table in front of him and he reaches for it, curls his hands around it and focuses on the cool drops of condensation kissing his skin, chilling his overheated palms. 

He tries to look like he’s been following, but there’s exhaustion written on the lines of Alex’s face, Mikey recognises it from grainy video calls from Iraq and unlike then he can reach out. He doesn’t. He doesn’t know if it’ll be appreciated, even if Alex looks like he needs a hug. Mikey wants to be the one to do that for him, to hold him tight so he doesn’t have to hold himself up anymore, to be the strong one, the way Alex always was-

“You drifted off again.” It’s not a question, and Mikey feels his ears burning a little. For a moment, he sees fondness slip over Alex’s expression, a slight upward quirk of his lips, a softening in his face. 

“Sorry,” Mikey apologises quickly and he can’t help but be upset at how surprised Alex looks every time that word comes out of his mouth as though he’s expecting something else instead of an apology. “I just- you’re really here.”

“Same place I’ve been since I got back to Roswell,” Alex responds, not quite dead-pan but close. Mikey’s heart stutters at the familiarity. It feels like banter, the same way Alex used to goad him when he stated the obvious and walked right into a trap. 

“I- but-”

“What did you mean,” Alex interrupts, “in the Pony. When you looked at me like you’d seen a ghost. When you tried to- I don’t know- to hug me?” He doesn’t sound sure of Mikey’s intentions and Mikey realises Alex hadn’t known at the time what he’d intended to do. 

He rolls the water bottle between his palms and tilts his head. “Are you sure you’re- I mean, do you wanna go and-” he gestures over his shoulder back towards the small living area, “-do you need to sit down?” His eyes drop to Alex’s legs without his conscious permission - he drags them back up immediately afterwards but he knows Alex saw.

“I’m fine, Gue- Evans. Answer the question.”

“I really think you should sit down, your leg-”

“Is _fine_.”

“But I-”

“You’re stalling. Answer the question.” Beat. “Please.”

Mikey sighs and twists the cap off the water bottle. His hands are shaking. He wants to close the gap between himself and Alex, or get Alex a stool because maybe his leg hurts. He doesn’t want Alex to be physically uncomfortable during a conversation that’s bound to be emotionally so.

Though, as Mikey thinks about the trailer and the alcohol, about the mad-science bunker (which, if the files were to be believed was less science-fiction and more science-fact) and the fact that clearly no one checked in on _this_ Michael regularly, he realises that the conversation might, really, just be harder on him.

He doesn’t really belong here, this isn’t his life, but for Alex, he could make it work.

***

“Will you stop?” Isobel smacked his hand as he reached up to fuss with his curls for the tenth time. “You’ll mess it up and I’m not fixing it for you again.”

Mikey squinted at himself in the mirror and huffed out a breath, twisting his fingers in the fabric of his t-shirt instead. She rested her chin on his shoulder and looked at his reflection with him and beamed. 

“There’s no way he’ll say no.”

“What if he does?”

“He won’t,” Max’s voice came over from where he was resting his shoulder against the door, making them both jump. “But if he does, we’ll convince mom and dad to take us out to that VRA-”

“V **L** A.”

“VLA place at the weekend to make you feel better.” 

Isobel made a sound and kissed the top of Mikey’s head before she wandered away to the bathroom that joined her room to Max’s. “I hate it there.”

Mikey just grinned. “You can’t hate it, Iz, it’s the best chance we have of finding out if there’s intelligent life out there.”

“I’m hard-pressed to believe there’s intelligent life _here_ ,” she retorted as she shut the bathroom door. “Let alone anywhere else in the universe.”

Max snorted and moved aside as Mikey went to leave Isobel’s room, catching his brother’s arm. “It’ll be okay,” he said quietly. “He won’t say no.”

“How can you be sure?”

“‘Cause,” Max started with a little grin, “no matter where you are, you guys belong together.”

Mikey grinned back, feeling his chest loosening slightly with the easy, lopsided smile on his brother’s face. 

“Yeah,” he replied. “I guess we do.”

***

Mikey knows he’s annoying Alex by not answering but he has no idea how to begin. He rocks on his toes and Alex shifts his weight slightly so he’s leaning mostly on his left leg, his arms folded across his chest. Mikey watches him tilt his head impatiently with an arch of that perfect left eyebrow and it’s so _Alex_ that something in his chest that has been fracturing since he saw Alex in the Wild Pony backing away from him finally breaks.

The water bottle hits the floor and the world goes a wobbly-white around the edges. Mikey grabs the edge of the table and Alex, concerned, rushes forward. He doesn’t mean to, but Alex is so close and his hand’s curled against the crook of Mikey’s elbow and he just turns and hides his face in Alex’s neck and cries.

It’s embarrassing and horrifying but he can’t stop now he’s started, years of pent up grief just escaping out of him in sobs that rack his body as he clings to the man - or a version of the man - he’s loved since he was a teenager, the man who was taken away from him far too soon. When Alex’s arms eventually come around his shoulders it doesn’t help, if anything, it hurts _more_ because it’s not his Alex.

But it’s _an_ Alex, and Mikey knows he can be better than the Michael here. It’s a wild, awful, _selfish_ thought and he tries to dismiss it immediately. It abates, for the most part, with the soothing circles of Alex’s hands against his back, absent touches that feel both familiar and alien for Mikey. 

“I- I’m sorry,” he manages, the third apology in less than an hour. “I just- I- I thought it’d be okay, seeing you again and I just-”

“Mikey,” Alex interrupts - again - gently. The use of his name makes the world around him go still, makes the raging orchestral grief fall silent. He breathes in shakily, tears still restricting his lungs and he leans back, knowing his eyes are red-rimmed and Alex is just looking at him and he can’t- he can’t _take it_. He can’t handle the sound of this Alex saying his name softly, he can’t take the warmth of hands on either side of his face, those brown eyes looking at him like he’s something to worry over and about. He wants to pull away but he can’t, so he just stands there, ashamed and embarrassed and _broken_ , the ragged edges of himself more obvious than they’ve ever been in the sharp light of Alex Manes.

Mikey leans forward and presses his face against Alex’s shoulder, hands fisting in the soft fabric of Alex’s sweater, feeling a hiccuped sob escape him again and Alex just curls his arms around Mikey again and holds him as he sheds his grief, drowning in it. He clings to Alex like he’ll disappear, as though the mirage in front of him that smells the same will dissipate like smoke.

Alex, patiently, waits for Mikey to pull himself together and Mikey’s deeply ashamed by the time he pulls back, able to control his hitching breathing and stem the flow of tears that keep trying to flood out of him. He wets his lower lip and steps back to give them both a little space and Mikey’s instinct is to follow, he even takes half a step, swaying back into Alex’s orbit before he catches himself and folds in on himself. He slips his fingers into his pockets so he doesn’t try and touch, he rocks up onto his toes because even that slight movement is enough to trick some small part of him into thinking that he’s closer to Alex if he just moves a little bit.

“I’m s-”

“If you say sorry to me one more time, I’m gonna-”

“You’re gonna what?” Mikey asks, lifting his head a little to look up at Alex, fingers still in his pockets so he can’t just wring them anxiously. The exasperated tone of Alex’s voice makes a little smile tug at Mikey’s lips and the reaction to the smile isn’t one that he’s expecting. Alex looks stunned, stock-still and amazed. 

Alex clears his throat and forces himself to look away, leaning himself back against the counter, weight carefully shifted onto his left leg. Mike wants to ask him if he needs to sit down, if he wants to take the weight off his leg, but he refrains if not just because he’s worried that whatever just happened between them, whatever _is_ happening might get broken if he sticks his foot in it again. 

Michael bites back on the comment that’s on the edge of his tongue and he bends to pick up the water bottle that he’d dropped, using the time to swipe at his eyes and rub his palm over his face like that’ll make him look less like the wreck that he is. He glances up at Alex with an uneasy smile and Alex just grabs himself a bottle of water and lifts his chin, indicating that they can head back to the couches. Michael slumps down into one heavily, legs stretched out in front of him.

Alex follows and sits, though he doesn’t slouch; he sits with his feet planted firmly on the floor, forearms resting on his thighs and water bottle dangling between his knees. He’s watching Mikey again and Mikey does his best not to squirm. He does sit up though, pulls his legs in and almost mimics Alex’s posture without meaning to, so when he catches himself, he grabs a pillow and ignores how the dog walks past him and jumps back up beside Alex, trying to wriggle her way under his arm. 

(He definitely doesn’t feel a small sense of achievement when Alex ignores her.)

“So,” Alex says, breaking the silence, “it’s pretty clear to me that you’re not my- That you’re not the Michael I know.” Mikey wants to ask what gave him away, but he thinks Alex won’t tell him. Not yet. 

“I’m not,” is what he responds with instead. 

“Hm.”

“That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say, Evans?”

“I don’t know,” Mikey replies honestly, “something a little more dramatic than ‘hm’.”

Alex’s eyebrows lift. “In the last few years, I’ve been in an active combat zone and lost a leg, come home to find that not only are aliens _real_ but that my father has been running an illegal top-secret investigation into my- into Guerin and his friends, shut it down, discovered a prison holding at least seventy aliens hostage, barely escaped the explosion, had my former best friend put my father into a coma after he tried to kill him, found out that Project Shepherd is only a small, defunct branch of a much larger - much scarier - operation, infiltrated it to stay one step ahead _and_ moonlight researching alien tech with the Michael Guerin of this world. Knowing that there’s another alternate universe out there is the least surprising thing I’ve learned in the last six years.”

Mikey thinks it’d be possible to hear a pin drop in the silence that follows the remarkably honest answer from Alex. He swallows and then nods because, honestly, what come back can he have for that? 

“That’s fair,” he mutters, taking a sip of water and playing with the lid briefly before replacing it. “I woke up here and-”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where did you wake up?”

“Oh- uh, at Sanders’ auto yard? I was in some kind of underground-”

“-bunker, yeah, I know the place. Michael keeps a lot of his alien tech there; it’s safely hidden from onlookers because he can move the trailer above the entrance to keep it out of sight. He spend way too long down there but…” he waves his hand, “I interrupted you.”

“No, it’s fine,” Michael hurries to reassure Alex that it is okay, really. “I just- I like hearing you talk. In the most un-creepy way possible, God, I’m- I just- I never thought I’d get to hear you talk again so…”

Alex tilts his head and Mikey can see the curiosity in his eyes, the question burning there that he doesn’t want to voice and Mikey doesn’t really want to answer but the words tumble out of him anyway.

His voice wavers, thready and trembling as he says, “In my world you’re- I- you never came home.”

***

It was one of the coldest winters Roswell had seen in recent years and as of early February 2011, the thermometer had barely lifted above zero. They were all stood in front of Jesse Manes’ new Ford Ranger, crowded together and huddled like penguins in their warmest clothes, gloves and scarves as an icy wind whipped around their faces. It wasn’t even six am, but everyone had come to see Alex off on his second official deployment. 

Liz was already tearful having hugged Alex goodbye so now she was standing with her arms wrapped around herself as she leaned her back against Max’s chest. He’d wrapped his around her and his chin was resting on the top of her head and though he was getting flicked in the face by the faux fur of her hood he seemed less bothered about that than he was about the fact that Alex was leaving. They’d always known it was a risk, that he’d go out again, Mikey had been watching the news with his heart in his throat, and they’d talked every day while Alex was in basic and that first deployment where he’d been on the other side of the world, sun kissed and bored. He knew it wouldn’t be too different now. 

When everyone else had said their goodbyes, Mikey stepped forward. Alex had been standing and waiting, watching him with a wobbly little smile on his face the whole time. He wrung his hands together and Mikey reached out, cupping his face and pulling him in until their foreheads touched and the warm clouds of their breath mingled between them. He closed his eyes and told himself he wasn’t going to cry, not just because they’d probably freeze on his face but it didn’t stop his eyes from stinging. 

Alex’s arms lifted and curled tightly around him. The fabric of Mikey’s jacket groaned under the way Alex’s finger twisted in it and they held onto each other for what felt like forever. When they pulled apart, Mikey started fussing with Alex’s scarf. It wasn’t sitting right. 

“You’ll get cold,” he muttered, nestling it underneath Alex’s chin with a frown that made Alex laugh. Mikey couldn’t shake the twisting feeling in his gut that he’d never hear it again. 

“I won’t need it where I’m going,” Alex pointed out with a little grin, reaching up and catching the fingers that were smoothing down his jacket, zipping it up a little higher. Mikey couldn’t do anything else with his hands and he needed to be doing _something_ because otherwise he’d shake apart. 

“That’s not funny,” he grumbled.

“It’s a little funny.” Alex caught Mikey’s chin gently and lifted his head, stealing a chaste kiss. “It’s- Mikey, it’ll be fine. It’s a shorter tour. I’ll be home at the end of July and we’ll compare tans and you can tell me which professors you made feel like idiots this semester.” 

He nudged Mikey’s nose with his own and tugged his gloves off so that he could press cooling fingers against his skin, push into his hair underneath the hood. Mikey felt the press of Alex’s ring against his ear and closed his eyes. 

“I know,” he mumbled, lifting his own hand and catching the back of Alex’s neck once more. “I just hate this.”

“I know,” Alex replied gently, “But I’ll be home before you know it. And if you don’t leave soon you’ll miss your bus back to college.”

“I want to see you leave.” 

“I know, but it’s the same as last time, dad’s gonna drop me off at the base in Albuquerque and I’ll call you when we get there.” Alex’s expression was soft, imploring and so full of love. “And you’ll be on the coach heading back to college because you’ve got a class this afternoon and you can’t miss it and fuck in your perfect attendance.” 

Mikey huffed out a breath and opened his mouth to protest but Alex’s eyebrows lifted in that way that told him there would be no argument. “Besides,” Alex continued, his voice dropping a little. Mikey heard it tremble and he just wanted to tug Alex into his arms and steal him away, hide him in his dorm until his enlistment period was over and then they could start a new life somewhere where the US Government couldn’t him. “I- I don’t want everyone to be here waving in the cold. It- it makes it feel too real.”

Mikey kissed him again, somewhere behind them Kyle was whooping, stopped only when Isobel elbowed him in the side. 

“I get it,” Mikey mumbled. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Alex said back, around another kiss. “I’ll call you in a couple of hours. Now go, get your bus and I’ll see you in July.” 

Mikey nodded and reluctantly detangled himself from Alex. Jesse clapped Alex on the shoulder and Alex leaned back into his dad’s chest, his smile wavering a little as tears pricked at the edges of his eyes and he climbed into the car. 

They didn’t leave immediately, and Mikey was the last one to turn away from the truck.

Only then did he cry. Max’s arm came around his shoulder on one side and Isobel’s slid around his waist on the other and his siblings held him up as they sat in the back of their mom’s car, curled together as they drove Mikey back to the bus station. 

It’ll be okay, they kept telling him. He’ll be back in July, they kept telling him. It’ll be over before you know it, they kept telling him. And Mikey, because he was young and he was a fool in love, believed them.

***

Mikey isn’t sure how it happened, but one minute he’s on the arm chair and Alex is on the couch and the next he’s sitting on the couch beside Alex. Alex is twisted towards him with his good leg tucked underneath himself and his shoulder against the pillow at the back of the chair. Mikey’s still rolling the water bottle between his hands, but after that statement, things get a little easier.

“I graduated from UNM,” he says, and Alex looks proud, a small smile on his lips causing his face to lighten more than Mikey remembered. “And then I did a masters and my first - and second - PhDs at MiT. I did my third one long-distance at the same time as my second.” 

Alex snorts, “Makes sense that, regardless of the reality you’re in, you’re a genius.” 

Mikey glances up at Alex who lifts his shoulders in a shrug and gestures for him to keep talking and so he does. Mikey find it soothing to talk about his home, as much as he misses it. He tells Alex about Isobel and Noah - filing away the alarm on Alex’s face at that name to ask afterwards - and how they’re struggling to conceive and are looking at adopting. He talks about Liz and Max and how they’ve been married for years, and they have a little person who pretty much owns Mikey’s heart. That Rosa and Maria got married not too long after it was legal - and Mikey knows his voice hitches when he says ‘marry’ but Alex, thankfully, doesn’t ask him anything about it - and they’ve got a daughter too. Maria still runs the Pony but only because Mimi wanted to travel. Rosa’s an artist, and she’s doing well for herself after she got clean. 

He talks about monthly lunches with all of the parents, including Jesse Manes, and how Harlan, Hunter and Flint regularly swing in with their partners and children. How they stay in touch on Facebook and through far too many group messages, how he speaks to the Manes twins at least twice a week, and whenever Flint remembers to call he does, bound together as the family they almost were. He pauses, stopping for a moment when Alex’s expression shutters closed and he looks away for the first time since Mikey had started speaking.

“What?” he asks, “Are they-” 

“They’re alive,” Alex replied, answering the unspoken question before it had fallen out of Mikey’s mouth. “It’s just- it’s not like that here.” Mikey doesn’t understand the way Alex’s whole body goes tense, the way he looks _pained_ by what Mikey tells him. He wants to ask more but he knows he won’t really get an answer. Not if the way Alex shuts down is any indication. 

Mikey leans forward and squeezes Alex’s right knee, he feels the prosthetic under his hand and it surprises him only slightly, less so than the fact that Alex doesn’t immediately push him away. Less so than when he glances up to apologise for crossing a line, Alex just reaches out and curls his fingers briefly around Mikey’s squeezing once and then letting go.

It takes Mikey a good fifteen seconds to remember how to breathe, to pull his mind away from the sparks that shot up his arm at the touch of Alex’s fingers against his skin, to draw himself back from the way that his whole body had become alight just from that tiny touch. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, “that it- I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s okay,” Alex interrupts, “you didn’t know.” 

“Is that why you’re living out here? In Jim Valenti’s cabin?” 

Alex nods. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go when I got back from Iraq. My- there’s a lot of things that’re different here.”

“I figured,” Mikey said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Are you and Michael-”

“We- we’re not- it's- we're not together.” Alex breathes out, like the words were difficult to force out from reluctant lips. Mikey doesn't like the way he looks when he says it.

He had expected that, from Alex's reaction in the Pony, from the look on Maria’s face, from the hesitant step back and borderline hostility. But it’s still a punch to the gut. Mikey can’t fathom it; being in a world where Alex is alive and not being with him? Where they were obviously friends, because he remembers the photo in Guerin’s box of belongings that was well loved and taken care of when relatively little else was. 

He swallows, pushes his hand through his hair and twists his body so he’s mirrorring Alex’s position. He stretches his arm out across the back of the couch, not reaching for Alex per se but also not _not_ reaching out for him. 

“So what’s the- What did he do?” 

“What makes you think he’s the one that did anything?” The sorrow under Alex’s words, the hurt that bubbles there, makes Mikey feel angry. Alex obviously spots it because he waves his hand and says, “It wasn’t just him,” which makes Mikey scoff in a way that makes Alex’s eyebrows lift. 

He takes a breath and shifts a little, pulling the cushion that’s sandwiched between him and the couch free and resting it on his lap, fiddling with the zipper before he catches himself and puts it down. The beagle - whose name Mikey is yet to learn - wanders over and sets itself down on it, settling by Alex’s right foot and resting her head on it, still staring up at Mikey like she’s waiting for him to step a foot wrong so she can bark at him or bite his ankle or whatever it is she’s planning on doing to him. 

“We both made mistakes,” Alex admits. “A lot of them. I- I walked away one too many times, let being back here get in my head. Didn’t communicate very well, I- it’s a long story. But we both messed up. And Michael-” 

“Michael what?” Mikey asked.

“He and Maria dated, there was- there was a lot that happened. I get why he did it-”

“Wait. _Maria_?! Rosa’s Maria?”

“Rosa died here, Mikey. Just before we graduated high school. There was an-”

Mikey leans forward, grabs Alex’s wrist but lets go immediately when he notices Alex tensing, like the unexpected touch startled something deep inside of him, a fear-based response he’s never truly gotten over. “Tell me.” He knows he looks like he’s begging and he probably is; Max’s place was trashed, Isobel wasn’t home, Rosa’s _dead_ and Michael and Alex aren’t together? This place is hell and Mikey needs to understand how this all happened. 

“Everything?” Alex asks, and he looks so tired and sad that Mikey wants to close the distance and hug him. Instead, he reaches back across the couch and takes hold of Alex’s hand again, gently so that Alex can pull away again if he wants to. 

Alex doesn’t move, so Mikey says, “Everything.”

Their hands stay touching and Alex talks.

***

The sun’s long since set by the time Alex stops telling the story and Mikey’s clearing up the plates from the dinner he’s made using the stuff in Alex’s fridge (which involved a conversation along the lines of _when was the last time you went grocery shopping? We should go in the morning; you have to have more basic things than this. You can- well, I can make **something** , but it won’t be great_) and the sudden domesticity of the moment steals his breath away. He nearly drops the plate back into the soapy water but catches himself and he glances up into the window, watching Alex clearing down and wiping the table and this might not be his Alex, and he might not be Alex’s _Michael_ but he can’t help but feel that there’s a part of them that would work, that would belong together.

He thinks he’d treat Alex a lot better than his this-world counterpart would, even if Alex spent a long time insisting that they were _both_ at fault. 

But none of that matters because he hears Alex blowing out a breath behind him and watches his reflection tugging on a jacket. 

“Where are you going?” Mikey asks. “It’s really late, I should- I mean, I should probably go back home to-”

“-to the Airstream, yeah, that’s where we’re going.”

“Together?”

“Look, you woke up in Michael’s bunker near a weird machine that responded to your touch, right?” Mikey nods. “So whatever Michael was fiddling with has done something to punch a hole between realities, that’s let him slide and swap places with you. So, in order to fix this, we need to have a look at it.”

Mikey feels his chest cave in a little. He knows that he shouldn’t be surprised that Alex wants his Michael back, but it hurts no less that Alex would want a Michael that went to someone else when things were hard instead of hiding his face in the curve of Alex's throat that was moulded for Mikey's forehead to press against. That small, traitorous part of him says that he can change Alex’s mind between now and the time they get the machine working, if they even can. 

“You’re right,” is what he says instead. “Maybe spending some time in my world’ll help your Michael realise what he’s missing.”

Alex lifts his eyebrow. “Together or not, waking up in a world where you’d died would be devastating to me,” he admits and Mikey takes in a breath. “I- I hope he’s okay.” 

Mikey just heads to the door. “We better get going, we can start having a look tonight. Maybe you can understand the notes he left better than me.”

“I can barely read his handwriting on a good day,” Alex admits.

“Well, it’s my handwriting too, so I can decipher if you can translate.” 

The worry hasn’t gone from Alex’s face, it’s in the lines of his body as he calls Wentz in from outside and she follows obediently as they head out to the truck. Alex lifts her in and she clambers into the back where she sits on the back seat, curled up on the passenger side and closes her eyes.

As they climb into Michael’s truck, loading Alex’s crutches into the back, careful not to disturb Wentz where she’s sleeping, Mikey looks at the way Alex’s brows are furrowed slightly, how the inside of his lower lip’s moving as he chews on it and how as much as he looks like he’s trying to be calm he’s so very worried and Mikey can see it. He can see it in every line of Alex’s body.

He knows he has to go home. He knows he does. 

But he really, really doesn’t want to. How can he go back to a world without Alex, knowing that this one isn't loved?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, a huge thank you to all the people that have commented, kudos'd and shouted at me on tumblr about this, I adore you all! We're halfway through! \o/


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His eyes fall on a picture of Max, Isobel and _Mikey_ and it explodes in a shower of glass and twisted metal and Michael realises that all that’s happening is that he’s adding anger and hurt and resentment to his repertoire of emotions. 
> 
> He does pick up the picture. He runs his fingers over the triplets and tries to suppress the burning in his eyes, fight against the lump in his throat that makes swallowing harder than it should be. 
> 
> This could have been him. This all- all of this could have been his.

He spent the anniversary of Alex’s death holed up in his bunker on a beaten up mattress he’d found at the junkyard with three bottles of tequila and acetone. He doesn’t remember it, and at some point, the cell phone - a smartphone with apps and text messages from _friends_ and _family_ \- died, the battery having finally given out somewhere between the twenty and twenty-fifth call from Isobel. He waited until the next morning to pull himself up and drag himself back to the house 

He hates it here. He’s been out to Foster’s ranch; of course, they don’t know him because he’s Michael _Evans_ , and Michael Evans has never done a day’s hard physical graft in his life, but they were kind enough when they found him stargazing to gently cajole him off their land rather than calling the cops. The last thing Michael wants to do is spend a night in the drunk tank here, too, and potentially ruin _Mikey’s_ life any more than he already has by just stepping into his shoes.

He can’t stop thinking about how different his life would have been if he’d been adopted by the Evanses, too. How he’d have had this life. He’d have had this life and maybe he’d have been good enough to be with Alex. Maybe he’d have been less of a fuck-up because they’d have had a family to fall back on, people that cared about him. Parents that loved him and worried, that pushed his curls off his forehead and kissed the crown of his hair and hugged him and told him it’d be okay. Maybe he’d have gone to UNM, like this Michael did. Done a fancy degree, then a doctorate. 

This Michael - _Mikey_ and the name makes him think of Liz and Max and his own home and he misses it so much that his chest hurts - is smart and successful and sober. This Michael has a home and a job, he has a family and a- 

He has no idea what Michael Evans actually does for a living and it’s that thought which propels him from the expensive couch he’s been sitting in with a large bottle of whiskey for the last three hours and up towards the office that he'd upturned the other day. He doesn’t even know how many days he’s been here, not really. 

His cell phone stays on the glass-topped coffee table, battery dead and screen dark.

***

Michael was expecting fireworks. He was expecting something more than the hollow-eyed resignation that was scrawled across the sharp lines of Alex’s face, the exhaustion smeared under his eyes, the bone-deep ache that sat on his shoulders and pushed them down like Alex was Atlas, crushed under the weight of reality.

“I should have told you before,” Michael said, hands in his pockets and hat on the bar. “Rather than letting you find out like-”

“Like this?” Alex interrupted, “Yeah, that would have been nice.”

“I didn’t know what to say, I just-” 

“I get it, Guerin.” Alex’s voice was clipped, distant. _Cold_. Michael knew that was to protect himself as much as anything else. Michael feels like a fucking heel as Alex steps backwards, folds his arms across his chest and shuts him out. He can see the walls going up behind Alex’s eyes, closing him off from the people around him, closing him off from _Michael_ in a way he hasn’t done for years. “I wouldn’t want the reminder either.”

“It’s not that, it-”

“It is, and I deserve better than you trying to bullshit your way through something to try and make me feel less shitty that my family legacy has ruined everything good in my life- and in yours.”

The amount of self-loathing that slips out of Alex’s lips wrapped and twisted around the tone of the words like a viper makes Michael’s chest ache. 

“Alex-”

“No, Michael. You need something that isn’t- I understand. All I’ve ever wanted was for you to be happy. God knows you deserve it.” He paused for a moment, shaking his head and pushing his hand through his hair. Michael wanted to mimic the movement, reach up and sink his fingers into the lengths. Since he’d left the military, his hair had grown and though Michael had been enjoying watching Alex’s reclamation of himself through his clothes and personal style it had hurt knowing that he’d made the decision not to be a part of that. 

He looked at Alex for a moment longer, looking at Alex looking at him. Alex nodded, eventually, like he’d made a decision though Michael couldn’t fathom what it was.

“Maybe in a few weeks we can try that friends thing again, then,” he said and Michael had felt his stomach churn.

“Yeah,” he replied quietly, feeling dejected and that only got worse when Alex moved past him.

Alex had always just brushed past, whenever he moved. He never had to, there was always room for him to pass by without touching but he never had done. Not until that day. Alex stepped to the side and walked past Michael and they barely shared the same air. 

“Don’t hurt her, Michael,” Alex said as a parting order. 

Michael tried not to think about how that was the first time outside of the sanctuary of his Airstream that Alex had ever used his first name, and it sounded like a goodbye.

***

The books on the shelves turn out to be more interesting than Michael ever wanted them to be. He’s a quarter way through A Brief History of Time before he realises what he’s doing and puts it to one side. He gets up and looks at the bookshelves again and his gaze stops on a pristine copy of a book called _Through Time and Space_ , by Dr Michael Evans. He picks it up and figures that at least if he understands what _Mikey_ does here, he’ll have a better chance of pretending to slip into his life.

If he can’t get home.

He wants to go home so badly. 

He settles in again on the comfortable armchair and flicks the desk lamp on.

> _**Chapter One**_
> 
> _It has been theorised over the last thirty years that we may be living in what is colloquially known as a ‘multiverse’, that is, a selection of realities that sit parallel to one another as though they were pages in a book…_

***

The sun’s gone down by the time he’s finished reading and Michael feels like his heart’s in his throat. He closes the book and runs his hand over the cover, letting his calloused fingertips brush over the name. He tries not to think about how this could have been him, that this could have been his life if only he’d been _chosen_.

Sometimes he can fool himself into thinking that the bitterness that crept inside of him when he was left behind melted fully into relief upon finding that Max and Isobel had it easier than him, that they’d had a better life. Sometimes he thinks he got over being left behind, got over the shock of it all that forced him to be mute for far longer than his siblings. Sometimes he thinks he’s over the pain that abandonment caused, the slice in his mind that had caused him blindingly strong headaches for eight months after Max and Isobel were taken away from him and their connection was severed. Sometimes he thinks he’s finally above the petty bitterness, above spite and jealousy and the negative emotions that swirl around him as much as he does his best to swat them away.

His eyes fall on a picture of Max, Isobel and _Mikey_ and it explodes in a shower of glass and twisted metal and Michael realises that all that’s happening is that he’s adding anger and hurt and resentment to his repertoire of emotions. 

He does pick up the picture. He runs his fingers over the triplets and tries to suppress the burning in his eyes, fight against the lump in his throat that makes swallowing harder than it should be. 

This could have been him. This all- all of this could have been his.

He could have had this life if he’d been worth choosing. If he’d been worth _loving_. It was a bitter pill to swallow that it wouldn’t have mattered how hard he’d tried when he was younger; he’d have never been as worthy of anyone’s love as this Michael was. That he’d never really be as worthy of Alex. Or Maria. Or _anyone_.

There are days where he thinks he deserves to be alone.

Today is one of those days.

***

He’d been drinking too much and he knew it.

The world wobbled at the edges and he offered Maria a smile that had charmed her pants off more than once, the same smile that worked on all the tourists that he’d taken home over the last ten years. The alcohol-and-acetone did a little bit to dull and numb the pain that ripped through him whenever he let himself think too much. Max’s absence in his mind was a gaping echo in his thoughts; he’d never thought that Max took up much of his mind because he remembered all too clearly the sharp pain that had ripped at him when their connection had been severed, time and distance and the natural decay of childish things. He hadn’t noticed the way that Max’s connection had slowly simmered back to life over time. It felt comfortable and warm, so subtle that Michael hadn’t noticed the way that Isobel and Max had just settled there in the place of his mind carved out in the shape of them. Now it wasn’t there, it hurt. It hurt like lemon juice poured onto an open wound. It hurt like gravel burn. It hurt like a slap to the face and a cigarette burn to the back of the hand. It hurt like a burning cross pressed to bare skin.

It hurt like a hammer to the hand and the desperate, broken scream of a seventeen-year-old Alex Manes. 

He felt empty. Isobel was still there, but the connection was weak, distraught because of everything she’d been through. Her mind was closed off, her presence in the back of his own just the lightest brush of psychic fingertips to check that he was still there but nothing more intrusive. Nothing more concrete. The emptiness hurt, an echoing chasm that nothing could fill. His mind was a mess, his entropy swirled and swarmed with sickening speed. 

Drink quietened it but didn’t still it, drink just numbed the jagged edges until he could run his thumb over them and only get cut a quarter of the time. 

Music didn’t help anymore; it was intrinsically linked with Alex Manes and the way Alex’s fingers had carefully pressed over his as he helped Michael form a few chords he’d formed slightly wrong. It was linked with the way that he’d sat in the toolshed and avoided the worst of the cold weather, strumming on a gifted guitar and listening to the music as it sang to the worst parts of himself and calmed the maelstrom inside. It was linked with that perfect first kiss and that first Moment and how their bodies had pressed together in a clumsy, giggly rush. 

Sex was a balm. It was that first brush of aloe vera on sunburned skin. It was the touch of euphoria, a rush of adrenaline and the intoxicating pull of a drug. It made everything go still, if not quiet, temporarily. When he could lose himself in someone else, the world was briefly stilled and he could focus on something past the pain and the emptiness. He’d buried himself in strangers in the ten years Alex was gone, hanging onto something he’d never wanted to look away from and using the warm, willing bodies of others to hide his fears that Alex would come back in a flag-draped coffin. He’d lost himself in Alex over and over even when he kept walking away. He’d lost himself in Alex because if he left a part of himself there, left a part of himself behind, maybe Alex would come back to return it. He hid his face in Maria’s neck and breathed in the scent of lavender and lemon with a hint of patchouli. He hid away in the warmth of her embrace and against the flat planes of her stomach. He let himself believe that because he could take care of her, because she needed him, that’d be enough. 

“You’re cut off,” she told him and he just grinned at her again and leaned over the bar, stealing a bottle of whiskey that she hadn’t put up on the back wall yet. He watched her purse her lips and narrow her eyes slightly before she just gestured with a dishrag that he should take the bottle upstairs. At least there he couldn’t pick a fight.

“You’re the best,” he responded, leaning over the bar again only to press a kiss to her cheek and he felt the way they lifted as she smiled. He heard the slightly bashful laugh that escaped her and she swatted at his shoulder. “See you in a bit, darlin’.”

“You still owe me for the bottle,” Maria had pointed out as he sauntered towards the stairs to drink himself into oblivion.

Later, much later, after the Pony had closed and Maria had dragged herself upstairs to grab some sleep before she went home, Michael had looked her and almost said _you’re not Alex_. The longing was powerful, the longing for someone that wasn’t her, for fingers that weren’t hers to be buried in his hair. The need and the want and the desire for a different body to be pressed up against his. He opened his mouth, alcohol drowned brain trying to sabotage him before he remembered Alex’s request: **don’t hurt her, Guerin.**

Don’t hurt her. Right. 

So he’d opened his arms and she’d crawled to settle against his chest, head tucked under his chin like it belonged there and her arm slung over his waist. He laid awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the tune of his entropy as it mocked him in Alex’s voice, twisting things he’d never said into something that sounded more real than anything else in his life: _don’t hurt her, Guerin. Don’t hurt her like you hurt me. Don’t hurt her or she’ll hurt you. We’ll all hurt you._

The morning rolled around too quickly and when Maria woke up she knew something was wrong. Michael hadn’t wanted to talk but she’d pushed; they’d never had that conversation after all and they’d never talked about Alex. It was the first time they’d really brought him up since they started their… thing. 

“I don’t wanna talk about Alex, Maria,” Michael argued and whatever she’d seen flaring in his aura had her backing away from him, wide-eyed and furious. Hung-over and confused, Michael stepped forward to try and reassure her with touch, to take her attention away from whatever it was she was seeing but it didn’t work.

“It wasn’t one-sided.” 

Her words threw him for a moment and he just stared at her. Maria, however, pushed her hands into her hair and looked distraught. She kept talking, piecing things together as she spoke aloud, thoughts becoming uncomfortable truths that he couldn’t deny.

“It wasn’t- I always thought it had just been a teenage thing. But it wasn’t, was it. It wasn’t just an experiment for you. You- you love him. You’ve always loved him.” She let out a laugh that could have, if it were anyone else, sounded hysterical. “I should have realised. You cleaned up your act when he got home. When you realised he was back you didn’t start a single fight in my bar, you didn’t drink as much. It was for Alex. How could I be so stupid?” 

“Maria-”

“No,” she snapped. “Don’t you ‘Maria’ me. You let me believe that it was over between the two of you but- but it’s not, is it. It’s never over.”

“Alex made it pretty fucking clear,” Michael retorted hotly, “he said he wanted to be friends, that he was done walking away and then he walked away again.” Never mind that everything horrible that had happened to him could be attributed one way or another to Alex’s family. “I can’t be around him. It hurts too much.”

“So I was a convenient distraction from- God, Guerin. I deserve better than to be someone’s- someone’s _consolation prize_.”

Michael felt deeply hurt by that, he’d never thought of her as being someone he was with because he couldn’t be with Alex but… wasn’t that exactly what he’d been doing?

“That’s not-”

“That’s exactly what this is, Guerin. I’d let myself think it might be something else but it’s not, is it? I was attracted to the idea of someone who would take care of me for once, that I could lean on but all you wanted was someone who wasn’t Alex. And I was there. I needed you and you-”

“Maria, will you just let me-”

“No, I don’t- I can’t. I can see it, Michael I can see how you feel about him. It shows in your aura. All I have to do is say his name and it lights up, I’ve seen this before and you- I thought it might have been me but it’s not, is it? You- you love him and you don’t- you don’t feel like that about me. I’ve been ignoring it, hoping that I’d be enough but I’m not, am I. I’m not _him_. And I deserve better than this.”

Michael felt his shoulders slump in defeat.

“I’ll always love him,” he admitted and he saw the sharp intake of breath, the hurt in Maria’s eyes. “But I don’t want to anymore, Maria, you have to believe me.”

“I do,” she told him sadly, large eyes filled with sorrow. “I believe you, but you- we can’t do this. I’m not the person to hide away in. I don’t deserve to be second to anyone.”

Michael raked his fingers through his hair for lack of anything better to do with them and desperately tried to work out what to say but all he could hear was the carefully constructed reality he’d fashioned crashing down around him, the world state slowly resetting to factory settings and shutting him out again. Someone else walking away from him with footsteps guilt-ridden as he heard Maria say Alex’s name like she was filled with a deep hurt. 

He heard her let out a breath that sounded somewhere between a scoff and a disbelieving laugh. He didn’t have anything to say in his defence, he knew that. They both did. He knew there had been times where he’d been pressed close against her and wished she was Alex. He knew she deserved better than him.

“Please don’t come back for a while,” she told him, her shoulders were set and she suddenly looked so _tired_. It felt final. The thunk of a coffin lid and the hammering of nails to shut it tight. “I need some time.”

“Maria, please-”

“No, Michael,” she cut him off. “You could have told me at any time that I was wrong. You’d have been lying, but you could have tried and you didn’t. That tells me everything I need to know. Get your shit and leave.” 

The door slammed shut behind her as she’d left him and Michael had stood feeling abandoned and aching and raw, heart bleeding, left in tatters on the floor with another set of footprints on it alongside the ones Alex had left so many years ago. All he could hear was Alex’s words _don’t hurt her, Guerin_ echoing around his skull and he realised that even though he’d tried so hard ultimately, like everything else in life that was important, he’d fucked it up. The final thing Alex had asked of him and he hadn’t been able to do that.

He gathered his things and left, and the drive back to his airstream had never felt more like the walk of shame.

***

“Mikey?”

Isobel’s voice cuts through his thoughts. It’s weird hearing her call him and not feeling the associated touch of her mind against his. He swallows through the way his mind tries to reach out for the connection that isn’t there and presses his teeth together so hard his jaw aches. 

“Mikey?” 

“In- I’m in here, Iz.” He calls, getting up from the chair that’s trying to eat him. It’s so comfortable he thinks he could probably just stay there forever and die happy, wrapped in the cushions and surrounded by the soft warmth. Vertigo hits him as he gets to his feet; a sharp reminder that alcohol and acetone for two days without any actual food wasn’t the start of a great diet. He must have swayed on the spot because the next moment the main light was on and Isobel was in his space, hands cupping his cheeks, checking his temperature with the back of her hand and catching his elbow to try and steady him.

“God, I’ve been trying to call you for days,” she says, her words a worried rush as she tugs him into her arms. He leans forward and hides his face in the curve of her neck, breathing in black cherries and orchid, letting it wrap around him and reassure him even as her fingers push through his hair and she squeezes him tight. “What- Are you okay? You look awful.”

She leans back and looks at him and he doesn’t want her to do that. Michael feels like he’ll get rumbled if she looks in his eyes. He doesn’t have that same happiness in his gaze that Mikey does. 

“Have you- Mikey have you been _drinking_?”

There are no words to describe the shame that crawls over his skin at the look on her face. The way she looks confused and disappointed and so very worried. He can't help the way realisation sinks in that he’s ruining Mikey’s life just by living his own. 

He pushes away from her and pushes his hands through his hair.

“Look, Iz, this-”

“What’s going on, Mikey?” Her tone’s shifted slightly; Michael recognises it. It’s her ‘stop playing around’ tone. “You’ve not answered any calls since we went for lunch, which you left way too early and you upset mom, by the way.” She wets her lower lip, folds her arms across her chest. “What’s up with you right now?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he settles for saying and hears the tone of preemptive defeat in his voice the same time Isobel does. She scoffs and he scowls. It feels familiar though, usually, it’s the other way around. “I’m serious.”

“Try me.”

He picks up the book he’s read cover to cover and pushes it towards her. She takes it and looks at the back, then the front, the splash of some nebula and she traces Mikey’s name with her fingertips. When she looks up at him, there’s no less confusion on her face. 

He lifts his chin indicatively. 

When Isobel seems to not get it even after a few minutes, Michael speaks again.

“I’m not Mikey.”

Isobel laughed, that sort of broken, stuttered laugh of someone who wasn’t sure if they were hearing a joke or a very off-colour comment and not enjoying it either way. 

“I mean it. I’m not- I’m not your brother. I woke up here in some other fucking reality where almost everything’s fucking perfect because the Evanses adopted me instead of leaving me behind- and I could- this place is almost perfect except Alex is _dead_.”

Isobel flinches in a manner Michael’s so used to seeing when he explodes. She looks at the book and then puts it to one side, reaching out for him once more, trying to catch his face between her palms.

Her gaze is level as she asks him, “Are you on drugs? Mikey- whatever it is, let me help you.”

“I’m not on drugs, Isobel,” he tells her. “Where I come from, my reality? You and Max got adopted and I got left behind. When we came out of the pods, we-” The thought of the pods strikes a new wave of grief through him. Max is in his own pod, stuck in the grip of death and he’s here, stuck here without Alex and without _his_ family, dysfunctional and broken though they may be. He’s here and he can’t help bring Max back. 

“Pods?”

“Yeah, we’re aliens.”

Isobel detaches herself from Michael immediately and goes to rummage her phone out of her bag. “I’m calling mom.” She doesn’t look afraid, but she doesn’t look like she believes him in the slightest.

“Look- Iz, Mikey theorised it was possible. Turns out with the help of some alien tech it’s absolutely real. I was hoping to- I was hoping to find out how to go home before I had to tell anyone but I can’t- I can’t go home. There are no artefacts here, nothing alien that I can see and you and- god, you and Noah are so normal.”

“It’ll be okay, Michael,” she tells him and Michael starts a little hearing her use his full name instead of the nickname that’s tripped off everyone’s tongue, her voice is carefully manufactured calm like she’s trying to stop him from jumping off a ledge into madness. “Mom’ll know what to do. It’s probably just stress, things have been so hard lately-”

“I’m not _crazy_ , Isobel.” Belatedly, he realises snapping defensively probably isn’t the best way of proving that he isn’t insane. “Please don’t call Anne- mom. Please.” 

The phone lowers a little.

“What if I can prove it?”

The phone starts lifting again back to her ear and Michael makes an impulsive decision. He lifts his chin and reaches out his hand and her phone flies from her grip into his outstretched hand in one smooth moment. She yelps and, again, Michael realises that was probably the worst idea because she snatches up her bag like she’s ready to run, taking her phone was a classically shitty move because he was removing her ability to contact the outside world. Fuck. 

His stomach drops out and he puts it down quickly on the table like a peace offering and lifts his hands.

“I didn’t- that was stupid.” He hates the way she’s looking at him, wide-eyed and afraid and ready to bolt at any moment. He wets his lower lip, carefully straightening up. “Here, take your phone. Look- can you just- Isobel, _please_ -” 

Her expression softens and Michael feels a twist in his chest, deep in his guts. His Isobel never looks at him like this. He wishes she did. He wishes his siblings loved him as much as he loved them. He wishes he was as loved as Mikey.

“Please,” he continues, “just hear me out and if you still wanna call mom and get me sectioned after this you can. I won’t stop you.”

Isobel, after taking a minute to just stare at him with her eyes narrowed slightly as she ran through scenarios in her mind, just nods. She wets her lower lip and takes her phone back from the table and runs her thumbs over the screen in a move that seems soothing to her. She doesn’t take a seat, though, and Michael can’t help the way guilt swirls nauseatingly in his throat at the fact that she looks spooked. She looks afraid. That’s his fault. That’s on him.

He sits down first, but she doesn’t follow suit. He doesn’t tell her to. They might have had a different upbringing, but Isobel’s need to feel in control is one of those universal constants. 

He rests his hands on his thighs, flexes his fingers a couple of times before he looks at her. 

“It all started a few days ago when I was tinkering with an artefact in my bunker…”


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It takes his breath away, he’s backlit and his skin just glows. Everything about him is thrown into sharp relief and Mikey just stares, heart stuttering to a halt in his chest as the world around him grinds to a halt. He thinks about keying the code in wrong again, or just waiting that little bit longer so he can preserve this moment. This perfect moment, only made more perfect when Alex feels eyes on him and turns, offering Mikey a warm smile with just a hint of teeth._
> 
>  
> 
> _Mikey could stay in this moment forever. He knows this. But he shouldn’t. He won’t._
> 
>  
> 
> _He can’t._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [InsidiousIntent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsidiousIntent) for pointing out some of my dumb mistakes. And thank you, as always, to Bea, Lire and MJ for their ceaseless encouragement!

Mikey takes a breath and leaves through some more papers. Michael’s notes are everywhere, pinned up on cork boards and tacked to the wall, scribbled in notebooks and napkins. Wherever there was something he could write on. Mikey wondered what kind of fevered madness pushed Michael to write on any flat surface. He can’t claim to understand where the guy’s head is at, but one thing he does recognise is a star chart of an alien - hah - star system and what looks like trajectory calculations, flight paths using the Earth to slingshot his way out of the solar system. He turns to point them out to Alex, who’s already following the path Mikey’s fingers are tracing with a look on his face that’s raw enough that Mikey feels his chest tighten.

“Yeah,” Alex says softly, looking away to flick through a dog-eared notebook. “He- he wants to leave.”

“Roswell?”

Alex’s eyebrow lifts and Mikey accepts the dry retort willingly because as soon as it fell out of his mouth he wanted to stuff it back in again. He knows that was a stupid question.

“The planet,” Alex replies though they both don’t need him to say it aloud. Not really. “He’s been trying since he was a teenager.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” 

Mikey hears the grief in Alex’s voice, the resignation that’s crept in more than once when they talk about Michael, or when they talk in general, and Mikey moves away from the board to stand in front of Alex. He doesn’t touch, at least not at first, but when Alex sighs he can’t help himself. He catches Alex’s upper arms gently, squeezing his biceps and tells himself he’s imagining the way the tension drains from Alex’s body, how he presses forward into the touch like he’s been drowning without it. 

“He’s got nothing here,” Alex continues softly, sad and so _tired_ and Mikey just wants to wrap him up in his arms and hold him until everything’s better. “Or so he thinks. No one can convince him otherwise.”

“Because of what happened between you?” Mikey asks. He hasn’t let go of Alex’s arms yet, and Alex hasn’t pulled away, so he takes a chance and lets one hand slide up to Alex’s shoulder, then to the back of his neck. 

“Because of that,” Alex admits, “and everything else. Probably more everything else than what happened between us.” 

“The alien stuff.”

“The alien stuff,” Alex repeats with a nod and a half-laugh that sounds broken and suspiciously wet. Mikey’s chest clenches. 

“You wanna talk about it?” 

Mikey’s hand slides to the back of Alex’s neck and he watches Alex’s head drop forward in response. He rubs his thumb over the skin gently, watches the way Alex almost sighs into the touch. He wonders how long it’s been since someone touched Alex in a way that was anything more than perfunctory and he feels angry again that this world, this reality, isn’t appreciating him.

“No.”

“Do you _need_ to talk about it?” 

Alex lets out another sound and Mikey can’t help himself. He tugs Alex into himself, tucking him under his chin and wrapping his arms around his shoulders. It takes Alex two and a half seconds to respond, but when he does and winds his arms around Mikey’s waist and _holds on_ , Mikey knows he’s in for a rough conversation.

The realisation that Alex is so desperate for physical affection - no matter where it comes from - is rough enough.

***

They don’t actually talk about it then. Instead, Alex melts into Mikey and... well, Mikey pushes his fingers into Alex's hair and holds on, chin resting atop his head and eyes closing to fight the way they burn and sting, struggling with the way his heart feels full. Alex pulls away after a long time - just over seven minutes, by Mikey's reckoning - looking at him with watery eyes, embarrassed and slightly flushed. Mikey watches as Alex mumbles apologies and detangles himself, rubbing his hands over his face and pulling himself together. He starts talking about food and plans and Mikey lets the moment pass. It doesn't come up again that day.

When it comes up again, they’re poking at the machine in Michael’s bunker for the fiftieth time and Alex is frustrated and worried and the tension in his body has him clenching and unclenching his jaw, falling heavily into the wheeled chair and digging his fingers into the thigh muscles above his prosthetic and hoping Mikey doesn’t see.

Mikey sees.

He comes up behind Alex carefully, slowly enough that he knows Alex has clocked his movement and puts his hands on Alex’s shoulders again, fingers pressing in small circular movements as he seeks out the knots he knows sit underneath the skin, the tension Alex holds in his body because he’s got no outlet that’s even remotely healthy. Alex doesn’t pull away, he leans back into the chair. Mikey thinks he closes his eyes but since he can’t see to confirm it, he just tells himself that’s what happens.

“I think Caulfield was the final trigger,” Alex says after a few minutes of quiet. 

“Oh?” Mikey’s a really good active listener, he’s always been able to tell when he needs to ask questions and when he needs to just be quiet. He doesn’t stop moving his hands but he does slow down - at least until Alex lifts a shoulder to make Mikey get back to what he was doing and Mikey’s never been able to say no to Alex. 

“Mm,” Alex continues. His voice is almost empty, Mikey recognises the tone from when he’s spoken to veterans who are recounting a traumatic event. “Remember I told you about Project Shepherd?” He barely pauses, so Mikey knows the question’s rhetorical: he hopes that Alex knows he’d never forget anything he’s told. “One of their satellite sites was in an abandoned prison just under a hundred miles from here. Called Caulfield. It-” 

His voice catches and Mikey stops the impromptu massage to focus on a touch that’s more reassuring. He knows it’s working because Alex starts talking again but, more than that, Alex reaches up with one hand to squeeze Mikey’s fingers.

“There had been other survivors from the crash in ‘47.” He swallows, Mikey can hear it. “My grandfather had- the Air Force had taken them captive, put them in this prison. Harlan Manes had been in charge of it, the project, he passed the responsibility to my father. He’s pulled my other brothers in, I wasn’t man enough for him.” 

Mikey scoffs before he can help himself, at first because he knows Jesse Manes would _never_ say something like that about anyone, let alone his youngest son but it’s a stark reminder that things are _different_ here, and the darkness with which Alex says ‘my father’ tells Mikey that that, too, is wrong here. “Sounds like you dodged a bullet, not being pulled into the family business.”

Alex shakes his head and Mikey moves to crouch down in front of him, hands on his thighs. The touch isn’t intimate, it’s comforting (that’s what Mikey tells himself as his fingers rest above Alex’s knees), but it still takes his breath away. For a moment, when Alex goes still, he thinks he’s made a mistake but then Alex’s hands cover his and he glanced up from where his head’s fallen forward. His lips are curled up into a weak smile.

“I’m still involved,” he points out, “just not in the way the rest of my family is.”

“Fair point.” Mikey concedes with a little smile, thumbs catching Alex’s fingers. Alex breathes out. “But for the record, you’re more of a man than he is. I- I mean, the Jesse Manes I know would never say that stuff to you but-”

“Mikey-”

 

“Yeah?”

“I can’t- please don’t tell me about him.” 

There’s a pain in Alex’s voice and Mikey wonders what else there is to peel back behind the curtain. He wants to ask, but it’s not the time so he just nods and apologises and he’s rewarded with a slightly wider smile. It almost touches Alex’s eyes.

Mikey wants it to, desperately. 

If nothing else, he thinks, he wants to make Alex smile at least once. A proper smile, something that lights up his eyes and chases away, even if it’s just for a moment, the sadness that sits there permanently like a storm cloud. 

“Caulfield was a mess. But- because I’d found some unusual heat signatures there I thought it’d be good to take Michael. We’d- after I’d told him it was over and then tried to build something properly between us… I thought it was the right thing to do. I should have just left him here but-

“They’d been running tests on the aliens there for over seventy years. I found Flint there-”

“Your brother Flint?” 

“Mmhm. He- I’m pretty sure he was being blackmailed or manipulated somehow but that’s not important. He’s Army, not Air Force. So I learned that Shepherd is more than just a rogue cell, it’s too well funded. We’re not rich enough. Anyway- they- there’s a genetic bomb I saw there, and-”

Alex lifts his hands from where they’re covering his and Mikey watches him rub them over his face, through his hair. He breathes out and it’s shaky, his eyes are glassy and Mikey has to resist the urge to wriggle between his knees and tug Alex forward until their foreheads are touching and he can chase away the pain.

“Michael’s mom was there. His actual mom. All his life he’s been looking for a way to find his people, to get home, for them to rescue him and they’ve been less than two hours’ drive away this whole time.” His voice is bitter, Mikey doesn’t like it. “Tortured and held captive by _my family_.”

“You’re not them,” Mikey says, the firmness of his tone taking them both by surprise. “You aren’t the people that did that to Michael and his people.”

“No, but I took him there,” Alex points out, flatly. “And he found her, while I was talking to Flint. And- and he triggered a failsafe, some kind of quarantine breach by trying to break the door of her cell. The place was gonna explode, we didn’t have long and I-” 

“Go on,” Mikey urges gently, he reaches up and lets his fingers brush over the sharp line of Alex’s jaw before dropping his hand away. 

“I got Michael out, told him he was my family. That I- I told him that I never look away. And he panicked. Told me he didn’t love me, that I needed to let us go, that we’ve never gotten anywhere and he has a point, he still has a point.”

“I’m not this guy’s biggest fan,” Mikey interrupts, drawing a wry chuckle from Alex, “but if this is a life or death scenario, hearing that you love him - because that’s what that means, right? ‘I don’t look away’?-” Alex nods to confirm the validity of his assumption so Mikey continues, “when stuff’s about to blow up isn’t the best time to make a declaration of love that’ll stick.”

Alex levels Mikey with a look that makes him seem at least a little chastised. 

“I’m just saying.”

“Well don’t. The long and short of it is that they… connected somehow, he found out she was his mom and then the whole place exploded. Seventy-three of Michael’s people and they all died. Because of me.”

“Because of your grandfather and your father.”

“No,” Alex protests. “Because of _me_. I took Michael there, I put him in that position. If I hadn’t-”

“-he’d have never met his mom,” Mikey says. “He’d have never seen that there were others of his kind-”

“-that he lost immediately. After that- after that, he wanted to be alone and he went to try and find Noah for answers. I didn’t want to leave him alone and I shouldn’t have done but I did and-”

“Alex.”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t your fault. You’re carrying so much guilt for things you can’t control. You didn’t know what’d happen or what you’d find at the prison. You didn’t install the failsafe, you didn’t know that you’d find Michael’s mom there. You didn’t know it’d blow up.” 

“I should have looked into it more, maybe just taken Kyle. I-”

“What ifs don’t do anyone any good,” Mikey interrupts for the third or fourth time. “Take it from someone who’s spent the last eight years wondering ‘what if’ and torturing himself with the possibilities.”

Alex’s expression shifts in a heartbeat and he reaches up, initiating the contact for the first time. Mikey feels like he could cry as he tips his head into the touch to his face.

“I’m sorry,” Alex murmurs. “Either way, pretty much everything that’s bad that happened in Michael’s life can be attributed to me or my family. And I know he feels the same way.”

Mikey knows this isn’t an argument he’s going to win; Alex has had years to punish himself for every slight he thinks his family have committed against Michael and that kind of reinforced thinking can’t be resolved in a single conversation.

But it’s something else that Mikey can work on. 

Alex swallows, drops his hand and wipes his palms on his thighs, sniffing and getting to his feet, fingers brushing over Mikey’s shoulder as he moves past him and back to the machine.

“We’ve wasted enough time,” he says, tone of voice indicating that he’s back in his ‘business’ headspace. “We’ve still got seventy variations of this code to try.”

Mikey gets to his feet and follows. 

They have work to do.

***

It’s gone ten pm by the time the machine blinks and whirrs. By the time it clicks and glows a gentle cerulean, pulsing with a viridian light at the bottom every four seconds. Mikey doesn’t know what it means, but the colour’s changed from a bright, electric blue to something softer and the symbols on the pad have flickered back to a solid, still state, no longer keeping up with their mercurial shifting.

“Well,” Alex says, glancing up from his notes, “that looks... promising.” 

Mikey wants to echo his optimism but it’s hard to. If this works, he’ll be sent back to his world and the Michael that belongs here will be returned. One version of Michael will return to Alex, and it isn’t him. 

He knows that it’s selfish to want to stay here when he’s got a great family at home. He knows it’s stupid to be willing to throw everything he’s got away for a chance at happiness with an Alex that is so similar to the one he lost but also different. He knows he’d never really belong in this reality; it’s sharp-edged and trauma-forged and Mikey’s too many soft corners and luxury. He’d never be able to slot seamlessly into Guerin’s space in this world. 

But still… it’s tempting. It’s tempting to rip out the guts of the machine when Alex is sleeping and claim a malfunction. It’s tempting to do something that sets them back a little, even for just a couple of days because they’re so close to success and he still hasn’t managed to make Alex smile yet and God, he wants to see Alex smile. 

“Do you want to turn it on?” Mikey asks, “Try the sequence Michael did and see if it brings him back?”

The hope in Alex’s eyes feels like a lead weight, the way he almost leaps to say yes before catching himself. Mikey’s disappointed in himself for how relieved he is that Alex doesn’t immediately just say yes. It means he gets another night.

“No,” Alex said, rubbing his hands over his face. “We need to recheck the input data and I think we’re both too tired for this. C’mon, we should call it a night and we can pick this up again tomorrow.”

Mikey doesn’t really want to sleep in the Airstream, but for him, the options are the beat-up mattress in the bunker or the beat-up mattress in the Airstream and he knows that neither of them is great for his back. He rubs his right finger and thumb into the webbing of his left hand and wants to ask Alex about why it aches a little but he can’t help but feel that’s another one of those things-Alex-blames-himself-for.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” Alex says quietly. “One more day won’t-” 

“-it might.”

“Yeah,” Alex agrees quietly. “It might.”

He sighs and heads up to leave the bunker. He looks as tired as Mikey feels and though Mikey wants to ask him to stay, he doesn’t. He just watches as Alex’s truck pulls out of the junkyard and disappears into the night.

He thinks about going to sleep, he thinks about what’s waiting for him in the morning. A goodbye and probably a trip home and though it’ll be good to see his siblings again - he misses them a lot and he understands, he thinks, why he hasn’t seen them here - but the joy of seeing his family, and his mom, is somewhat dampened. It’s hard to be excited about something that comes with a fresh load of grief.

Instead of sleeping, he goes down to the bunker. 

A part of him thinks about turning the machine on, testing it out so that things might just be magically fixed in the morning but he doesn’t. Instead, he sits and he tinkers and he _learns_.

***

“Can I see Max?”

Mikey asks the question that’s been bothering him for the last couple of days. Ever since Alex told him about the alien situation or, at least some of the alien situation. Max is dead, or, they think he’s dead. But they’ve put him in a pod in the hopes of finding some way of bringing him back from the dead, which only happened because he tried to resurrect Rosa, who had been killed by Noah ten years ago.

The history here is complicated and Mikey feels like he needs flashcards to remember it all. A bigger blow to comprehend, maybe even more than the whole being-an-alien thing, is the knowledge that Noah - one of Mikey’s best friends in the entire universe - in this world was an evil alien psychopath who hijacked Isobel’s mind for over a decade to make her kill people for him.

“In the pod?” Alex asks, looking up from where he’s been checking and rechecking the input sequences that Michael had scrawled on bits of paper. They’ve determined that the first half dozen of the more viable ones were definitely not right, partly because Michael had scrawled through them and written the word ‘fuck’ in various styles. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“He’s still my brother,” Mikey says, softly. “I just- I haven’t seen anyone else since Maria and my mom and- I know it’ll be weird, I promise not to freak out or anything.”

“Under the circumstances,” Alex offers dryly, “you’ve done a great job of not freaking out.”

“Oh,” Mikey replies with an expression on his face that makes Alex honest-to-God laugh, “I’ve definitely done my share of freaking out. I just hid it very well.”

Alex, chuckling, admits, “You did.”

They fall back into a comfortable silence for a few minutes before Mikey snags his fingers on a crumpled up piece of paper and throws it at Alex. Alex looks up, surprised and - thankfully - not at all annoyed considering he throws it back. His aim is better than Mikey’s; it bounces of Mikey’s head and falls to the floor.

“So?”

“So what?”

Mikey wrinkles his nose and throws another piece of paper, which makes Alex chuckle again. “Can we go see Max?”

Alex sighs, the smile disappearing in a split-second, and rubs his hand over his face. Mikey can tell he doesn’t think it’s a good idea but Mikey wants to. He gets why Alex might not want him to look at the possibly-sleeping-possibly-dead face of his brother in a state of suspended animation inside an alien pod but Mikey needs to see something else familiar. Or… sort of familiar.

Okay, honestly, Mikey’s also _so curious_ about the ‘alien’ part of it all that he can’t deny himself the opportunity to actually see, first hand, that there is unequivocal proof of life on other planets. Even if this isn’ t his reality. 

“Please?”

Alex tongues his lower lip in thought, denying a response for a long few seconds before he just nods his head. It’s a single nod, and he puts the pad down. Decisive steps take him towards the ladder and like a colossal idiot, Mikey asks, “Where are you going?”

With one hand and one foot on the ladder, Alex turns his head to look at him and the expression on his face is screaming _how can you be so dumb?_ Mikey, too, wonders that considering how smart he’s meant to be. Alex - his Alex - always made him dumb. It’s apparently another universal constant.

“The pods aren’t here, genius,” he teases, and that little smile’s back. Mikey feels his chest tighten with an excitement that’s more because of the smile than the pods but it’s a close match. “C’mon, it’s a long drive out there, we best get started.” 

Mikey puts the papers down quickly, then realises that he might forget which one they were looking at so he sticks his pencil on top of it, then thinks better of it and draws an asterisk in the corner of the page as a reminder to himself. 

He follows Alex up and out (closing the bunker behind himself with a heavy, metallic thud that makes him jump) and towards Alex’s car like an over-excited puppy and he just shrugs his shoulders when Alex huffs out a laugh and calls him a dork. 

God, he thinks, he’d do anything for that smile.

***

Whatever Mikey is expecting to see when they arrive at the Turquoise Mines, this isn’t it. Alex’s car rumbles to a halt at the bottom of a small hill, pulled into the dirt at the side of the road. He knows that the look he gave Alex at the _now we walk_ was priceless because they’re halfway up the hill and Alex is still chuckling to himself.

It makes sense that the pods are hidden, he knows Alex has a point, but as Alex pauses and rubs at his hip like it’s hurting him, Mikey feels a stab of guilt and makes a mental note to help Alex stretch out his right piriformis when they get back to… wherever they’re going to go next. It’s easy to forget that Alex is missing the lower part of his leg; he compensates so well. It’s one of the major differences between this Alex and his. 

There are a few differences; Mikey’s recognising them the more time he spends with Alex. This Alex has shadows, ghosts. They sit behind his eyes and underneath the edges of a smile that’s never been allowed to blossom, as though the experiences of his life are too sharp to let him smile as widely as he’s capable of lest he gets cut. Lest the world takes it away from him. Though they haven’t talked much about what Alex went through, Mikey knows that his life has been hard. Harder than his own, and certainly, harder than his Alex’s. He wonders if his Alex would have come back from war with the same ghosts, the same trauma, and there’s a part of him that’s almost relieved that his Alex never had to see the end of the war, that he never had to try and return to a life where he might not have felt like he fitted.

The realisation is like a stab in the chest and Mikey stumbles, foot catching on an exposed tree root and Alex is there in a heartbeat, hand under his arm on the left, catching his wrist on the right and stopping him from face-planting into the dust. 

It makes Mikey’s world lurch. He glanced up to find Alex is a hair’s breadth away from him, dark eyes concerned and focused, teeth caught on the inside of his lower lip. For an agonisingly long moment, Mikey can’t breathe. His senses are clouded by _Alex_. He can feel Alex’s breath on his lips, smell the no-nonsense shampoo that probably doubles as a body wash because he knows Alex hasn’t fully shaken many aspects of the military lifestyle. From here, he can see the faint scar on his forehead, the way it wrinkles with the lines as his brows lift. He can see the faded beauty mark just under his hairline. He can see the way Alex wets his lips and his eyes dart down reflexively. 

It’s quick, Alex lifts his eyes and looks away almost immediately but Mikey notices. He thinks about how easy it would be to just lean in and close the space between them.

He almost does, the world’s stopped turning for now and it’s just the two of them and it would be _so easy_... 

Alex breaks the moment. Mikey doesn’t know if he’s relieved or not.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Mikey’s breathless and it’s got nothing to do with his fall. Or near fall. He straightens up, lets Alex support him until he’s steady and offers the airman a little grin. “We got much further to go?”

“No,” Alex reassures, patting Mikey’s upper arm and extracting himself from Mikey’s space. They’re in the damn desert, there’s no excuse for his whole body to have gone cold just because Alex has moved away from him but it does. “Just up here.”

Mikey nods and follows, keeping his eyes firmly anywhere but on Alex, because the jeans he’s wearing are sinfully tight and though Mikey is only human it feels wrong to look.

Okay. It feels wrong to look more than once.

Twice.

***

For the second time in half an hour, Mikey’s confronted with something he isn’t really expecting. He really doesn’t know what he thought he’d see when he’d asked to see Max in the pod. He guesses, in one way or another, he’d hoped that the whole pod thing was an elaborate euphemism for some kind of hospital bed and that Max wasn’t really dead but in some kind of alien lab where they were trying to make him better with science.

But no.

He steps into the mines and sees the soft, warm amber light first. Then the lawn chair with thick blankets folded against it. There’s a generator and a light, there’s books and abandoned flasks. Mikey can see a rolled-up sleeping bag, too, and he wonders who’s been out here keeping a silent vigil over- over Max.

Max is naked. He’s not proud that he zeroes in on that pretty quickly, but he does. As his brother, that’s only slightly less disturbing than seeing him naked and floating in the central egg-shaped pod thing. 

“This is-”

“I know, Mikey,” Alex says quietly from behind him where he’s standing at the entrance to the mines like he’s unsure of his welcome. As Mikey feels his shoulders deflating he can hear the sound of footsteps coming up behind him before Alex’s hand rests on his shoulder.

Mikey, without shame, leans back into it. 

“He’s really-”

“I know, Mikey,” Alex says again, squeezing Mikey’s upper arm. 

“Is he-”

“I’m not sure,” Alex murmurs, standing beside Mikey now, hand still on his shoulder. Mikey wishes that Alex would wrap his arm around him and tug him into a hug, pull him away from the sight of his brother in suspended animation. 

Alex doesn’t move, and Mikey inwardly curses (not for the first time, either) the version of himself that’s made Alex hesitate to touch him. Mikey had always felt like Alex’s hands were made to slot against his, that their fingers were meant to twine together like the teeth of a zipper. Or something more romantic. Normally it would be more romantic but Mikey can’t tear his eyes away from the sight of his brother in an alien pod and the world’s even wonkier than it was when he woke up in a bunker.

“He’s not dead.” 

Alex opens his mouth to say something, but when Mikey turns his head to look at him, he snaps it shut. He just nods. 

“He’s not dead, right?” 

“If there’s a way to save him, Liz’ll find it.” Alex sounds confident. Mikey wonders how much of that is for his sake. He doesn’t doubt that Liz will be the one to find a miracle cure. She’s the smartest person he knows (other than himself and sometimes, his past actions have made him wonder if academic smarts are the only thing he has going for him whereas Liz is just a genius at life and he loves her for it), and it’s reassuring on many levels that this Liz is just as smart but there’s a helplessness he can’t help but feel. 

“Has he been helping?”

“Who?”

“Guerin.”

Alex hesitates again before he just nods, “Yeah,” he admits softly. “Michael’s been helping too. He’s not just good at physics. He’s just- he’s _so smart_.” The wistfulness in Alex’s tone makes Mikey’s heartache. 

“So the longer I’m here, and he’s not…” 

“Don’t,” Alex says softly and Mikey steps forward, away from the warmth of Alex’s hand and reaches out with his own, fingers brushing the smooth, warm surface of the pod. His skin glows the same way it used to when he’d stick a torch underneath his fingertips and watch his skin change. “This isn’t your fault.”

“I know,” Mikey reassures, voice hitching slightly as he brushes his thumb over where Max’s cheek would be if he could actually touch him. For a moment, he misses his brother so much he can’t breathe and his throat closes on a sob that he tries to suppress. “I just-” 

Alex is behind him in an instant, turning him away from the pods with gentle hands on his shoulders. His hands catch Mikey’s face gently, bracketing his cheeks to stop him looking back at Max and Mikey just leans forward until their foreheads are touching.

He closes his eyes and breathes in, soaking up the comfort Alex is offering. His hand is warm against the back of Mikey’s neck and tempting though it might be to close the gap between their lips, Mikey just drops his head to Alex’s shoulder, hides his face in the curve of his throat again and feels arms slide around him properly.

He drops his hands to Alex’s waist and holds on.

He can’t stay here. He can’t. He can’t deny Michael and Isobel the chance to get their brother back. He’d help, but alien DNA, human biology… he doesn’t know anything about that. 

“C’mon,” Alex says eventually, breaking the silence that had previously only been punctuated with Mikey’s shaky breathing as he tried to control himself and not have a total breakdown in front of Alex (again). “We should get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Mikey mumbles, pulling away and rubbing his hand under his eyes as though that’d stop Alex from seeing the way they’re wet with tears he’s refusing to shed. “Yeah, we- we’ve got work to do.”

He knows the smile he gives Alex is wobbly and watery and unconvincing, but Alex doesn’t call him out on it. He’s grateful. 

As they head out of the cave, he looks back at the pods once more and his chest clenches.

“Don’t worry, Max,” he murmurs, “Michael’ll be home soon. You’ll be a family again. I’ll make sure of it.”

***

It’s evening, almost night. The dusky New Mexico sunset casts an eerie amber glow over the mouth of the bunker that hasn’t been trapped underneath the Airstream in a few days. It pours down in a shaft like holy fire, red and yellow and orange, bouncing off the dull surfaces and adding extra light that the low-hanging Edison bulbs just can’t, despite their best efforts. Mikey thinks it’s beautiful and makes a note to see if this place is replicated in his world. He looks up from the papers to see Alex standing off to one side, brow furrowed in concentration and thumb pressing against his lower lip.

It takes his breath away, he’s backlit and his skin just glows. Everything about him is thrown into sharp relief and Mikey just stares, heart stuttering to a halt in his chest as the world around him grinds to a halt. He thinks about keying the code in wrong again, or just waiting that little bit longer so he can preserve this moment. This perfect moment, only made more perfect when Alex feels eyes on him and turns, offering Mikey a warm smile with just a hint of teeth.

Mikey could stay in this moment forever. He knows this. But he shouldn’t. He won’t.

He can’t. 

If Michael doesn’t come back, Max might never come out of the pod. They’d be down a person and he can’t imagine how badly Isobel’s taking Max’s absence. He thought about her a lot on the drive back and thinks that it’s her that’s been keeping that silent vigil over her sleeping twin (in this reality, at least). War and Peace on the side of the deck chair, the warm sleeping bag and blankets - because Isobel’s always cold and even in the summer she finds having weighted blankets a comfort, a balm against anxieties that plague her and nothing’s more comforting for her than being wrapped up like a burrito surrounded by him and Max - indicative that she’s been spending more time there than she should be.

He has to let Michael save Max.

He has to let _Michael_ have Alex.

He has to put this right because he has the technology here, even if it means going home to a world where he’ll never see that smile again.

“I think,” Alex says, breaking him out of his thoughts and Mikey feels himself flushing like he was caught staring - though it’s hardly the first time Alex has caught him and if he were to stay it would hardly be the last, “we might finally have the right sequence?”

Mikey nods and offers Alex a quick, quiet smile. He knows Alex sees the sadness at the edges and he walks closer but is stopped before reaching out to hug him. Mikey can’t handle that right now; if Alex touches him again he might trash the machine. Slide into this life. Leave his siblings and his mom and dad and… and Max would never wake up.

“Maybe,” Mikey replies with a nod of his head. “Only one way to find out.”

He’s already started punching in the numbers. The viridian lights pulse with increasing brightness and it starts whirring, a whistle and a repetitive click. A breeze blows the papers backwards. 

“Mikey-” Alex starts, but his words are drowned out by the increasing noise which is deafening. It bounces off the walls of the bunker getting louder with each repetition. 

All of a sudden, silence falls. It’s deafening in its own way and Mikey’s ears are ringing. The machine’s glowing green and Mikey reaches out to touch it, to cover the symbols with his palm just as a female voice he knows better than any other says, “Michael, what the hell is going on?” 

His palm touches the symbols - sorry, Iz, he has to do this - and his world whites out.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He lets go of her hand and rubs his fingers over his face and through his hair. Being this close to Isobel and not being able to feel her presence in his mind hurts. It hurts like a knife through his brain, like she’s been carved out of him and is being waved in front of his face like he’s Tantalus, stuck in eternal torment wanting and needing but never satisfied. Everything he wants is pulled away from him before he can get a good grip on it.
> 
> Hah. That doesn’t feel too far off from his life anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to [InsidiousIntent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsidiousIntent) for giving this a once-over, and to [mandsangelfox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandsangelfox) for reassuring me that a shorter chapter is not a bad thing!!

“You know I can still hear you,” Michael drawls as he sits down at a booth near the back of the Wild Pony. He’d agreed to let Isobel drag him here because after freaking her out thoroughly with a not-too-uncommon lapse into extreme honesty she’d decided that he was having a mental breakdown. When they hit the bar, he grabbed a bottle of whiskey from behind the counter and unscrewed the cap in blatant defiance of Maria’s complaints. He’s further through the bottle than he wants to admit and is picking at the peeling label.

Crowded around the bar, Isobel and Maria and talking in tones that are much less hushed than they might think. 

“That’s not the point, Mikey.”

“ _Michael_. Liz took to calling me that after Texas.” He knows he sounds wistful, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about what he had that he’d been taking for granted. He might not have Mikey’s life, but honestly, he doesn’t really know what to do with it now it’s in front of him. Now he has almost (almost) everything he’s ever wanted all he wants to do is go home. Home to his Isobel who’s cutting and sharp and insults him with every other breath but he knows she loves him. To Liz, who keeps calling him Mikey even though he tells her he hates it (and he really, truly doesn’t). To go back to Valenti and his sharp sarcasm and fierce protectiveness of Alex. To go back to Max and his lectures, to go back to Maria and her bright eyes and the banter he wants to have with her so badly. To go back to…

Alex. 

He wants _Alex_. He wants Alex so badly it physically fucking aches inside of his chest.

He takes another swig of whiskey and swallows a too-large mouthful, feeling it burn down his throat. Good. He needs that.

He can’t stop thinking about home. His home. The place where he belongs but can’t get back to. There’s no technology here, no fucking aliens. No Hail Mary or Deus ex Machina that’s going to fall out of the sky and save him, that’ll propel him home. He hates the way that he can’t help thinking about _Mikey_ and Alex. How Mikey’s probably gentle in all the ways Michael’s rough. His hands are probably really soft, having never done a day’s hard work in his life. 

He takes another pull on the whiskey and closes his eyes, rests his head back against the leather of the booth and pretends he’s not listening to Maria and Isobel as they talk.

“I’m not joking, Maria. He _pulled my phone out of my hand_. Without touching it.”

Maria reaches over the bar and curls her hand around Isobel’s fingers, stopping the anxious tap-tap-tap of her nails against the bar top. Michael doesn’t need to open his eyes to know that Maria’s eyes are on him. He can feel it, he’s always been able to tell when people are looking at him; the self-preservation superpower of a kid who never knew safety until he was living alone in an Airstream with a lockable door.

He salutes her with the bottle without even opening his eyes.

“He told me he’s an alien and that he- there was some technology that’s meant he switched into our world from his where Alex is still alive and I was married to an alien serial killer - Noah, Maria, he called _Noah_ a serial killer! And-”

“Okay,” Maria’s voice is calming. Cool. The way Michael never remembers it being. She’s always been sharp-edged and sassy, with a quick rejoinder or a witty comeback. The tenderness in her tone was always reserved for people that weren’t Michael Guerin, her most hated customer. “Okay, look- I’ll-”

“Let me save you the trouble, DeLuca,” Michael interrupts. “She’s telling you the truth, I’m not having a mental breakdown, I’m not the Mikey that you guys all love so damn much-” Wow, okay, when did the alcohol hit him so hard? When was the last time he’d eaten?

“That’s enough.”

“There’s the Maria _I_ know,” he says, smugly. He puts the bottle down and cracks an eye open to see that it’s half gone. That’d make sense. He’s got no idea when he last ate properly; crackers and a sandwich at some point, he thought, but he’s pretty much been on a liquid-only diet since he arrived in Pleasantville. In all honesty, for the last couple of months, his diet has been mostly liquid. It’s easy to fall back into old habits when there’s nothing to look forward to when he wakes up in the morning. 

“When the others get here, we’ll talk.”

“Goodie,” Michael groans. He feels the booth seat sink a little as someone joins him and he feels a hand curling around his. The fingers are cool, a little clammy. He knows it’s Isobel, even though _his_ Izzy never has cold hands, and he sighs, opening his eyes to look at her again. She looks terrified. 

Guilt crashes into him like a tidal wave and he catches her fingers with his thumb, squeezes gently. 

“I’m sorry, Iz,” he says as though that makes everything better. “I don’t know how to go home and bring your Michael back.”

“It’s gonna be okay,” she tells him, reaching forward and brushing his curls back from his forehead with a tenderness he doesn’t know how to take. Evidently, his brain knows better than he does because his eyes drift half shut and he tips his head into the touch. Even more so when she presses the back of her hand against his forehead, then his cheeks, like she’s feeling him for a fever. “You’re really warm, Mikey, are you-”

“I always run hot,” he reassures, reaching up to catch her wrist and pressing a kiss against the palm of her hand. “It’s part of being an alien, Isobel. I- I know you don’t believe me right now and I- fuck.”

He lets go of her hand and rubs his fingers over his face and through his hair. Being this close to Isobel and not being able to feel her presence in his mind hurts. It hurts like a knife through his brain, like she’s been carved out of him and is being waved in front of his face like he’s Tantalus, stuck in eternal torment wanting and needing but never satisfied. Everything he wants is pulled away from him before he can get a good grip on it.

Hah. That doesn’t feel too far off from his life anyway. 

“I’m sorry, Iz. Without my lab, without _anything_ , I don’t know how to get home. I can’t- I can’t bring him back for you.”

Isobel just looks at him and then pulls her worried gaze away to Maria, who’s eyeing him from behind the bar with suspicion and that same half-glazed look she gets when she’s reading someone. Michael’s always thought that Maria’s psychic abilities were more than just being really good at cold reading. The way she broke up with him, seeing something that he couldn’t about himself - using his aura, she later told him - was more than just being really good at reading people.

“Don’t read me, Maria,” he asks her. “I hate that.”

Maria says nothing. Instead, she looks away with a perplexed expression and starts wiping down the bar. She doesn’t look over again and even when Liz walks in she only shoots a worried glance in his direction before greeting Liz with two shots of tequila and a hushed conversation that has Liz looking back at Michael with her eyebrows raised.

It’s hard to forget how expressive Liz’s face is, but somehow Michael forgot in the time it’s been since he last saw her. He lifts his fingers and wiggles them in her direction in greeting. She looks good, still, which shouldn’t be a surprise to him since he saw her at the weekend gathering but it is. 

“I can call Max,” he hears her say. 

“No,” Maria replies, catching her hand over the bar. “Isobel’s already vetoed that option. She doesn’t want to worry him.”

“Worry him?!” Liz’s voice is louder. “His brother might be having a psychotic break. He’d want to be here. He needs to be here, Maria, I can’t-”

Isobel pats Michael’s hand and gets to her feet, walking over to the bar to tug Liz into a hug and pull Liz’s concerned eyes away from where she’s looking at Michael like he’s insane. He appreciates that. He doesn’t have anything else to drink even though it’s tempting: the world’s already spinning enough around him. 

He stops listening to them, Maria and Isobel trying to placate an overly worried Elizabeth Orte- Evans. Ortecho? It strikes him that he doesn’t even know if she took Max’s surname. He thinks it’s more likely that Max took Liz’s name.

He just lets the hum of their conversation, hushed voices speaking rapidly in a way only the women in his life have managed until the door bangs open again and someone with heavier footsteps walks in. Michael knows they’re male but doesn’t recognise the gait.

He recognises the voice, though.

“The hell, Evans?”

Valenti.

“Great,” he says aloud, opening his eyes again and looking at the trio of formidable women at the bar like they’ve betrayed him. “This guy.”

***

Kyle stops dead in his tracks and turns that stupidly sharp-featured face in his direction. He waits for a moment, like he’s expecting Michael to quantify the insult and when it doesn’t, those eyebrows lift and he tilts his head, managing to look affronted without his expression shifting all that much.

He looks the same here, but then almost everyone does. Michael doesn’t know why he keeps expecting everything else to be different. 

“What does that mean?” 

When Kyle asks him that question he doesn’t sound angry, or like he’s spoiling for a fight. He doesn’t sound like he’s ready for a confrontation. If anything, as Michael looks at him more closely, the tilt of his head is guarded and he looks hurt. Hurt and confused and his shoulders are hunched slightly. 

He watches Kyle lick his lower lip, looks at the girls and - when Isobel nods minutely to give him permission - approaches to sit just to the right Michael in the horseshoe booth he’s made himself comfortable in.

“Michael,” he starts and something in him twists at hearing _his_ name. The look on Kyle’s face is carefully crafted Doctor Kyle and Michael feels himself clenching his jaw. 

“Don’t look at me like I’m one of your patients, Valenti.”

There’s that hurt look again. Michael can’t help the way he bitterly thinks, of course Mikey and Kyle fucking Valenti are friends here. Of course. Mikey doesn’t have any natural enemies despite being the absolute opposite of an Apex predator. 

“Then tell me what’s going on.”

“Didn’t Isobel brief you when she texted?”

Kyle nods. “She did, but I’d rather hear it from you.” 

Michael breathes out and lifts his chin slightly, the bottle on the table wobbling before it slides towards the end quickly. Kyle moves on instinct to catch it but as his hands reach out, it shoots upwards and then back into Michael’s waiting hand, raised near his shoulder.

“I’m an alien.”

He knows Liz and Maria saw that little display because there’s a silence that falls over the bar that feels almost unnatural. 

Kyle’s the one that breaks it.

“Right.” He puts his hands flat on the table. “Start talking.”

***

As Michael talks, gradually they all come to join him in the booth. His story stops, voice catching as he realises that he’s trapped in and he swallows past his discomfort, trying to work out if he’s enjoying the attention or if he’s just been that starved for it that he’ll take what he can get.

He talks about the pods. He talks about Isobel and Max being adopted and his being left behind. He glosses over foster care and homelessness - he’s already tainted Mikey enough without giving them the memory of their friend through pity-tinted lenses. He touches on high school and the giant bag of dicks named Kyle Valenti who queer-bashed and hurled insults at Alex on the daily. He doesn’t talk about the toolshed and covers it with a ‘it was a bad few months’. 

Michael thinks he might have them all on board, that maybe they could fully believe his story. Nothing breaks the spell of them listening to him until he mentions Alex again. He talks about running into Alex before the reunion and Kyle interrupts him.

“That’s not funny, Michael.”

The mood’s soured immediately. Michael bristles at the insinuation that he’d be so crass as to joke about Alex’s death, or life. He clenches his jaw and counts to ten and goes to have another pull on the whiskey bottle no one wants to touch but Isobel’s fingers catch his wrist. Her eyes tell him he can’t, or he shouldn’t, and he just drops his hand to his lap and suffers with a dry throat. 

“I’m not joking. Where I come from, Alex survived the war. He did another two tours after his first one and lost his lower leg in a-” 

Michael freezes. It strikes him that he doesn’t know how Alex lost his leg. He doesn’t know the details of the accident, just what it did to him and even then he only knows the obvious injury. He doesn’t know what happened or when, where Alex was rehabilitated. He doesn’t know what other wounds Alex obtained when he lost his leg and though he traced his fingers over scars he didn’t recognise in their stolen moments he realises with an icy drop in his stomach that he _never asked_.

“In a what?” Liz asks, her brown eyes are huge and watery, the idea of Alex being hurt but _alive_ was one that was far preferable to all of them than the reality they face. 

Michael, however, is stuck on the realisation that he had never asked Alex how he obtained his life-changing injury. It hits him then how much about Alex he _doesn’t_ know. How many chances they had over the years to talk to each other, to share secrets and stories, snippets about their lives and they… didn’t. Alex asked him about his life, tried to get to know him and he talked but he didn’t return the favour. He didn’t ask anything about Alex that he wanted to know. It throws Alex’s _but we didn’t even know each other, did we?_ into a new light.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

The bottle on the table wobbles dangerously, and behind the bar the glasses start to rattle. Their chiming is loud and annoying and they explode a second later which makes everyone jump. Isobel grabs Michael’s hand but Michael’s world’s narrowed down to the fact that he’s fucked up more than he had thought. Alex had been trying to give them a solid foundation, knowing each other inside out in a way that didn’t involve knowing how to tear each other apart with insults or ruin each other with touches and kisses. 

He’d misunderstood and maybe Alex hadn’t explained himself well but he had been trying. And Michael…so used to being left behind and tossed aside, so used to being unwanted and never _chosen_ had taken the path of least resistance. The same thing he’d done in so many foster homes. Reject them before they reject you. Hurt yourself, break your own heart so that when they decide you’re not worth it you don’t care.

He drops his head forward and the bottle on the table stops wobbling. The tinnitus-like ring that always accompanies the use of his powers falls quiet and Michael’s aware his breathing is ragged.

Embarrassed, he wants to lash out at someone but when he risks a glance upwards at the faces around the table, everyone looks concerned. No one looks like they’re going to tease him or call him out for losing control of his powers like that. 

He wets his lower lip. “In an- an accident.” It’s a lame answer and he shakes his head, “I- it’s not-”

“It’s not easy to talk about,” Maria says, though the look on her face tells him that she knows he doesn’t know the answer. No one else does, and Maria’s lips curl up into a small smile like his secret - of being a shitty human (alien) being - is safe with her. 

“That,” he manages, gratefully. 

His hand’s shaking as he grabs the bottle by the neck and takes a sip. Maria excuses herself to get everyone a drink, sweeping the glass into a neat pile as she does to be picked up later. 

Nerves steadied, knowing that the worst part of the story is yet to come, Michael takes a breath and starts talking again.

No one interrupts him.

***

By the time he’s finished talking he’s pretty sure no one’s breathing. Or, if they are, they’re imperceptibly shallow and quiet. Liz’s hand is across her mouth as though that’ll hide the heartbreak in her eyes. Isobel’s gripping his fingers so tightly they’re aching. Kyle’s just staring at him, trying to puzzle him out. Michael wets his lower lip and opens his mouth to speak again, unsure if they believe him or if they still think that he’s having some kind of grief-related nervous breakdown.

He’s leaning heavily towards the, considering his story part of a grief-related nervous breakdown, because no one seems to know what to say, until Maria - god _damn_ he misses Maria so much, he misses Maria as a friend and banter-partner and he can’t believe that’s one more wonderful thing in his life he’s ruined - gives him another small smile.

She reaches over Liz, who had settled on Michael’s right while Isobel took the left, and takes Michael’s hand. Her silver rings are cool against his skin but her hand is warm. When she touches him, he feels a bolt of _something_ ripple up his arm. The initial shock fades and is replaced with what he can only describe as a gentle, humming warmth that cascades through him. 

He glances up to see Maria looking at him with, soft-eyed and sad. He doesn’t think he’s ever truly been read by her, not if this is the sensation that he feels when it happens. 

“He’s telling the truth,” she says, and her voice is barely above a whisper. He’s only met Mimi DeLuca once, but there was an ethereal tone to her voice. Michael can hear it in Maria’s now. “He- he’s not our Michael.”

Michael resists the urge to say _I told you so_ as chaos erupts around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those of you who have joined me on this ride, we are so close to the finish I can taste it. 
> 
> I appreciate every single one of you that has commented, kudos'd and generally been awesome. I'm so grateful for you all <3 
> 
> ALSO: A lovely person on Tumblr did some art for this fic, which you can find [here!](https://neverheardabout1d.tumblr.com/post/186705601106/michael-in-the-empty-bunker-from-the-overly-angsty).
> 
> (if you'd like to come and scream about Malex with me, you can find me on [tumblr](https://hannah-writes.tumblr.com).


	9. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Mikey?”
> 
> He knows that voice. He thinks he might be smiling but he can’t tell, but his eyes are definitely burning beneath the closed lids.
> 
>  _Isobel_.
> 
> He’s _home_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, a _huge_ thank you to [InsidiousIntent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsidiousIntent) for making this intelligible as a lot of this was written in the middle of the night in a state of sleep deprivation!

The first thing he notices is that it’s _cold_. It’s cold and his ears are ringing. His head hurts and he feels the sort of disorientation he has only really experienced once before in his life (coming off a rollercoaster and he’s got no desire to experience that brain-to-body disconnect again, thank you very much). His eyelids feel like they’re pinned down with lead weights, his whole body is somewhere between numb and tingling, like he’s just received an electric shock.

The sound of his own groan echoes in his ears, louder than the tinnitus that’s lancing his brain but not loud enough to drown out the gasp from somewhere to his left. 

“Mikey?”

He knows that voice. He thinks he might be smiling but he can’t tell, but his eyes are definitely burning beneath the closed lids.

 _Isobel_.

He’s _home_.

***

The second time he wakes up, he’s comfortable. The mattress is soft - not at all like the one he’s had to make do with - and the sheets are warm. They’ve got a high thread-count, he’s sure of that. They’re not quite silk, but close. He wonders, slowly letting himself rouse from deep, _deep_ exhaustion, if Isobel bought them for him while he was away.

Isobel.

Home.

 _Alex_. 

Mikey’s eyes open and he jerks up in the bed, taking in the recognisably unfamiliar surroundings. His heart’s hammering in his chest; he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Alex and the ache that causes is breathtaking. He’d never get the chance again and- and-

And he’s not in his house.

The decor looks very Isobel, but with a masculine touch that she seems to slowly be erasing. He gets out of the bed and runs his fingers along the sheet and looks at his left hand. The bones ache slightly and the reality of his situation hits him.

His knees feel weak, he isn’t sure if he’s relieved or disappointed but when Isobel appears in the doorframe, her steps gentle enough that she arrives like an apparition, silent and surprising, he doesn’t have time to think.

She lifts her chin and the world around them lurches.

***

Mikey blinks into a pastel-soaked, shimmering landscape. Everything’s just on the edge of iridescent, shining like the gossamer wings of a dragonfly. He likes it here, it’s peaceful. Quiet.

In front of him, stands Isobel, looking regal. He’s always thought that; in another life his sister would have made a great queen. She’d have commanded armies and devastated continents leaving broken-hearted men - princes and paupers alike - in her wake. She’d be loved and feared equally, people loyal to her because of her mind as much as her beauty because they knew she could destroy them with a thought. 

This isn’t _his_ Isobel, though. He knows that, now. His Isobel, though still sharp, has softer edges. Her eyes are brighter. Whatever the Isobel of this world has seen - what she’s experienced, from the little that Alex has told him - has made her hard. Wary. Hurting. Mikey can see her pain, the way it’s written behind her eyes. She wields it like a weapon.

This Isobel is a warrior. A survivor. 

She might not be _his_ sister, but he’s proud of her all the same.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t a little (lot) terrified as he realises that this isn’t a dream. Alex spoke a little about the powers of the Evans twins, and Guerin. How Isobel’s was some kind of psychic power but he didn’t know much about it, which meant that Mikey, too, knew very little about what was happening to him.

“Now we can talk,” Isobel says, and her voice wraps around him like a blanket, warm and comfortable. He could sink into it. Mikey really does miss home, he misses his siblings, the ones who burrito around whichever of them was upset (usually Isobel), the ones who light up when they see him and run to hug him before their partners (or children) get there. The ones who came to his graduation and cried (even if Isobel says to this day that she absolutely would never do something so ridiculous as cry in public). 

“We couldn’t have talked… uh… where are we, Isobel?” 

Her eyebrow arches. She looks around and wets her lower lip, sinking down as though to sit but there’s nothing there. Mikey instinctively moves forward to stop her but the scenery shifts, melts like a prequel-era Lucas Star Wars scene transition. It would be nauseating but he never registers the movement. More importantly, Isobel doesn’t hit the floor. She sinks into an armchair.

Mikey does the same, with the one that’s appeared behind him. 

Okay. Sitting down he can do. 

He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Where are we?” 

“I call it the mindscape,” she tells him. He watches as she looks around and Mikey resists the urge to follow her gaze. The whole place is still bright with that unnatural sheen. It’s too quiet, everything has a slight ringing echo to it, almost siren-like, which would be ethereal in another circumstance. Knowing enough about comic books means that he’s suitably ill at ease with the prospect of being in someone’s mind. Or someone being in his mind. “I’ve got total control in here so don’t try and lie to me. You can’t.”

He blinks at her a couple of times, probably stupidly. 

“Why would I lie to you?” He offers her an expression which he’s fully aware is nothing short of completely perplexed. “I mean, firstly I have nothing to lie about and secondly, I’m a really bad liar.” 

She didn’t look impressed. 

“Are we in your mind or mine?” He asks, feeling the nerves creeping up the back of his neck and turning his mouth onto the setting for ‘babbling’. “How does it work? Some kind of neurochemical bridge? Some sort of energy transfer? Is this a shared space or-”

“Michael,” Isobel cuts him off, one hand lifting. She isn’t wearing her wedding ring. He remembers a moment later that Noah’s a serial killer alien here, who used Isobel as a puppet for over a decade and-

His fingers curl in the fabric of the arm chair. Precious little makes his blood boil more than the thought of people hurting his sister. 

“I don’t know how it works, we’re in your head but I’m designing what it looks like. You’re going to tell me what you’ve done with my brother and you’re going to tell me now.”

All pretense of civility is gone. Isobel looks cold and calculating, like the villain at the end of the movie who’s been pulling all the strings. Mikey swallows and forces his brain away from that track. This is _Isobel_. She’s not a villain. She’s his sister. 

“I haven’t done anything,” he told her. “I woke up in that bunker surrounded by way too many bottles of liquor and beer and when I- when I ran into Alex and we-” He swallows, rubs his palms together and then links his fingers at the back of his neck, using the pressure to ground himself. He can feel a headache coming on.

He wonders if it’s possible to get headaches on the astral plane. Mindscape. Wherever they are. He figures it must be; he has one. 

Shrugging his shoulders, Mikey looks down at his knees. The fabric of the jeans is so worn, it’s not quite threadbare but it’s close. He has the bizarre urge to pick at the loose thread on the inside seam just above the left knee. He swallows, shifts on the spot and finally drags his eyes up to an Isobel who is as unforgiving as she is formidable.

“I haven’t done _anything_ ,” he repeats, not quite pleading with her to believe him but honestly he’s really not that far off. He just wants her to look at him like he’s _Mikey_ , like he’s himself. Like she’s his sister. The same one who kissed his forehead when he fell off his bike that first time, the one who cradled him at Alex’s funeral when the grief was so thick he couldn’t breathe or see, the one who knows he can look after himself but regularly swings by ‘just to check’ because it’s one of the ways she tells him she loves him. 

The longing that hits him for his siblings is intense. It makes his throat tense close up slightly. It’s not just them, either, it’s everything. 

“I just woke up here. I’m guessing we switched places, using the machine in the bunker. I don’t really understand how it works but it looks like it might somehow bend space-time? Puncture holes in the fabric of realities that are beside this one? Your Michael was that desperate to get away from this place he sort of… disappeared himself?”

Isobel narrows her eyes. He holds her gaze for a few long seconds and feels like she’s staring into his soul. She’s already poking around in his head, as far as he understands it, so he shouldn’t feel _more_ uncomfortable at the extended eye contact, but he does. 

He tilts his head and looks away, uncomfortable with the sudden rush that he gets from Isobel. She doesn’t have to say anything, but there’s grief that rocks through her at the thought that Michael wanted to leave, as well as the longing and love she knows he feels for Alex. There’s anger and betrayal and deep, _deep_ hurt. 

It’s the love, though, that’s really overwhelming and Mikey gets to his feet and breaks eye contact. Isobel loves him so much. Loves Michael. And from what he can gather she doesn’t realise - or didn’t - that he felt so alone and isolated. Isolated enough that he felt his only choice was to keep messing around with things that might help him escape the planet, or this life, perhaps (assuming Michael knew exactly what he was messing around with).

“There’s nothing to go back to,” Isobel says and Mikey wonders what part of that he said aloud. “Our planet was destroyed in some kind of war. We don’t know many details but Michael-”

“Alex says he wants to leave the planet,” Mikey interrupts. “There’s a console in his bunker, star charts and trajectory mapping where he’d use several planets as slingshots to build up kinetic energy. I don’t know how close he is to it but it’s something he wants to do. This machine’s just part of it.”

Much as there are some universal constants when it comes to Alex, there is where Isobel’s involved, too. Mikey can see the way she swallows, the way her head tips slightly like a bird assessing its prey. He knows she wants to argue with him, she has that same set of her jaw that his sister does, but she’ll lose. His Isobel never gets into an argument she’s not completely confident she’ll win. He wonders, in this scenario, if this one’s the same.

“How do we get him back?”

Her question is a loaded one and they both know it. Mikey doesn’t take it as a rejection because it isn’t. He doesn’t belong here, Alex isn’t his to love, Isobel isn’t his to love, Max isn’t his to save. Not this Alex, anyway. Not this Isobel, not this Max. This Alex is _Michael’s_ , heart and soul and Mikey can see that. He won’t be the one that ruins that. He won’t be the one that takes another Alex away from another Michael. 

He’s lived through that once. He can’t inflict it, even if the separation isn’t death, on someone else. On himself, albeit another reality’s counterpart. 

“I’m not sure.” He can’t lie in here, after all, though it’s tempting to try so that he can reassure Isobel. Every part of him wants to lie to her, to tell her that he’s got it worked out. That they’ll be okay and when he turns it on again it’ll be to bring Michael back. To send himself home to a world without Alex. To where he belongs, to the family that needs him. The family he misses so much. “I think I know what I did wrong, but I’ll need to recalibrate the machine. It might take me a few hours to get it right.”

Isobel just nods and gets to her feet. She approaches Mikey and he goes still, hoping she isn’t about to slap him. She doesn’t. Instead, her hands cup his face and she pulls him into a hug. He drops his head down to her shoulder and winds his arms around her waist, and hugs her tightly and as he closes his eyes, the iridescent sheen of the world fades.

***

Mikey hadn’t missed how Alex had tried to hide his disappointment that the device hadn’t worked. He knows Alex wants his Michael back, and if they’d had enough time to get to know each other properly, maybe it’d be different. Maybe Alex could see himself being with Mikey. But Mikey knows that there’d always be a part of them comparing each other to their counterpart and Alex deserves better than that.

Even if ‘better than that’ comes in the shape of a Michael that doesn’t see what he’s got right in front of him. 

He blows out a breath and carefully takes the faceplate off the device. Inside the viridian light pulses from an unidentifiable point. It’s like the light doesn’t have a source and he’s surprised at that even though he knows he shouldn’t be. 

There are parts littering the table and though Michael’s diagrams are mostly number sequences that did or didn’t work, Mikey thinks there has to be something else to it. Something _different_. Besides, he figures if he manages to make this thing work one last time and then never again, there’s no risk of Michael accidentally-on-purpose sliding back into another reality when things get bad again. If they get bad again. If he can’t save Max. If he can’t- 

Mikey couldn’t take it if he was pulled away to this place again. It’s hard enough to leave this time. He doesn’t think he’d be able to do it a second time. 

Pushing his fingers through his hair, Mikey drops into the battered office chair that groans and squeaks and rolls backwards a little bit with the movement. He looks up at the hatch and resists the urge to climb up and out, to text Alex and suggest they grab some food. Alex has barely slept; he’s been watching Mikey, running calculations and deciphering notes. He’s been running interference for those that’ve been asking about Michael and has done his best to not let on that he’s worried sick that this is permanent. 

Alex’s attempts to hide how he feels aren’t as transparent as he likes to think. Mikey wonders if anyone’s taken the time to watch him and his micro-expressions that give away what he’s thinking or feeling even when his face is seemingly impassive. Mikey wonders if Michael can-

No. 

He shuts that thought train down immediately. It won’t do him any good. It isn’t fair to him and, if he’s honest, it’s not fair to Michael either.

On the desk there’s a yellow legal pad and at the top, in Mikey’s neatest handwriting (which isn’t, by anyone’s standard, anything approaching neat) are the words _Dear Michael_. 

He’s gone back and forth for a couple of hours now, trying to work out what he should say to Michael, if anything. He doesn’t think that his counterpart would appreciate a letter telling him that he really should treasure what’s in front of him (Alex) and that though things didn’t turn out well for him, he still has some people (Alex) that love him and that he doesn’t have to be alone if he doesn’t want to be.

Though Mikey appreciates that things are more complicated than they seem, and Alex has been very sure to point out that Michael’s not the only person who’s screwed up, it could be simpler than they’ve made it. And maybe he’s been too simplistic, maybe he’s naive. Maybe Mikey doesn’t understand because there’s the shadow of Jesse Manes that Alex won’t talk about. Maybe it’s because too much time has passed. Maybe it’s something to do with the way Maria greeted him. 

But love is love and Mikey knows how quickly it can be lost.

He twirls the pen around his fingers before checking the time. 

Eleven fifteen.

He figures he can spend a little longer down here, he thinks if he can just understand how the thing works he might be able to retrofit it. He doesn’t know what cycle Michael had put it on originally since it had powered down but Mikey’s got more degrees than he should have really needed (academia was a good way of avoiding having to face the reality of being left in a cold world without Alex) and one of them had to be at least a little bit useful.

The major benefit to having a puzzle like this to keep him busy is that he’s only now, faced with the reality of going home for real, thinking about how it’s been ten years since he asked Alex to marry him. 

His eyes burn and he closes them like it would stop the tears from falling. He wraps his arms around himself and rocks slightly on the chair but the groan of the old mechanism does little to hide the sob that escapes him as he cries alone in an old nuclear bunker, momentarily lost in his grief as though it were fresh.

***

> _~~Dear Michael~~ Michael,_
> 
> _~~In an unsettling turn of events~~ _
> 
> _~~I wanted to write you a long list of things that you should~~ _
> 
> _I’ll keep this short._
> 
> _You’ve seen what a world without Alex is like. Don’t waste your second chance._
> 
> _I don’t know what happened between you but I know you’ll do right by him and he’ll do right by you. I trust you. Love him, the way I know you do._
> 
> _-Mikey ~~Evans, PhD~~_

***

The weather’s not as bad as it could have been; the sun’s hot but isn’t beating down on the deck chairs as they sit in the cool evening sunset. The sky’s dyed ochre and pale lavender. Flames of the setting star lick along the clouds, highlighting them silver and deep indigo. Shadows are long and the firepit throws Alex’s face into sharp relief.

“Liz says hi,” he says, shifting the milkshake where it’s precariously balanced on the arm of the chair. Mikey offers Alex a weak smile in response, though it broadens a little as he watches Alex dip his fry into his milkshake, savouring the salty-sweet contrast. 

“Michael’s going to have some explaining to do when he gets back.” 

The slight smile on Alex’s face falters for a second. Mikey doesn’t allow himself to feel hope that the sorrow that flickers in Alex’s eyes is for the fact that he’s talking about leaving. He knows it’s because Alex is thinking about Michael. It’s just another reminder that this isn’t his place and he wants his mom so badly that his chest aches with each breath. 

“Yeah, well, I figured I’d leave that for him.” Alex recovers quickly and shrugs his shoulders. “I saw you’ve- well, it looked like you’d taken the thing apart and put it back together again?”

Mikey nods. “Sort of? I messed around with it a bit but put it back the way it was. I hoped if I saw the inside I’d understand it better.” He gives Alex a sheepish smile and is rewarded with a soft, huffed laugh. “It didn’t help.” If Alex catches the lie, he doesn’t react to it.

“Figured. Michael understands a quarter of what he’s looking at, at most,” Alex says and Mikey hears the way that Alex’s voice brightens a little at the mention of Michael and a reference that isn’t painful for him. “So if you understood anything at all I’d be impressed.”

Mikey chuckles and finishes off his fries. In lieu of a napkin, he wipes his fingers on the thigh of his jeans and snags his milkshake. This is nice. The air’s warm, but not suffocating or oppressive, and if he closes his eyes he can pretend that he and Alex are sitting on their porch together. The illusion’s weak and it doesn’t stick but it helps Mikey come to terms with what needs to happen next.

 _Tomorrow_ , he tells himself, as he asks Alex to share stories of Michael from this reality. As he asks Alex careful questions about his time in the Air Force and how he’s handling being back. As he realises that no one’s really asked Alex about how he’s coping in the aftermath of everything and he swallows down his disappointment in _everyone_ not just for letting Michael feel like he’s alone but for letting _Alex_ feel that way.

Tomorrow he’ll go home.

***

Tomorrow rolls around too quickly.

Mikey has breakfast with Isobel in her house. It’s huge and feels empty, devoid of Noah’s presence. Mikey understands that the Noah in this world was a scumbag, the worst kind of alien. He understands that Noah is evil, or _was_ evil, here. He just can’t reconcile that with the Noah that he knows. The one who worships the ground his sister walks on, who looks at her like she hung the moon. 

They talk for a while, and she tells him about Michael, and how she’s angry at herself for being so focused on trying to watch over Max that she’d missed Michael tailspinning. That she’d felt the connection break but had chalked it up to her mind reminding her that Max is gone. She manages to hold it together for the most part, but her voice breaks when she says Max’s name and Mikey’s beside her in an instant, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and tugging her into a hug. She melts against him, hides her face in his shoulder and doesn’t sob, but her frame shakes slightly. 

She tells him that, in another life, she’d have wanted him to stay.

He smiles sadly and tells her that, in another life, he’d never have wanted to leave. 

It’s a short goodbye, but it’s the only one he can give her. She promises him that she’ll do better and he’s glad to hear it.

He can’t make the past easier for Michael, but he can do a little bit to help his future. 

There’s no one else to see, other than Alex, so Mikey makes his way halfway to the cabin before he just turns the truck around and rumbles down the dusty roads to the Airstream, texting Alex when he arrives to ask him to come over.

 _{Be there in ninety minutes.}_ is the reply. 

An hour and a half is plenty of time. Mikey only has a few calibrations to do, a few adjustments to make. He’s got a pretty good understanding of what might have gone wrong the first time and he’s ready. Tweaks have been done, calibrations have been finished, retrofitting and modifications have been completed, the sequence he needs is primed and just needs confirmation. He’s ready to try and make things right.

It’s tempting to activate it now, rather than wait for Alex to arrive. That way he doesn’t have to say goodbye. That way he doesn’t have to have the memory of a final goodbye to another Alex he’ll never see again. It’s tempting, but Mikey’s never been a selfish man, not truly. 

He folds the letter and slides it under the machine - he knows Michael will find it sooner or later - and then sits down in the creaking old office chair and waits.

***

An hour and a half isn’t enough time.

It’s definitely not enough time. 

Mikey realises that it’s nowhere near enough time as the lights of Alex’s truck shine through the papered windows of the Airstream. He realises it’s nowhere near enough time as he hears the door of the truck closing and the slightly uneven tread of Alex’s feet on the dirt outside the Airstream. He realises it’s nowhere near enough time when he can feel the hammering of his heart in his throat stealing his breath away because now’s the time. It’s here.

He knows this has to happen, but an hour and a half isn’t enough time.

He’s opening the door before Alex can knock. He smiles a little, he knows it’s weak and Alex gives him a look. 

“It’s okay,” he says, stepping down out of the trailer and closing the door behind him, even though it’s anything but. This is the way it has to be and he wishes he could take Alex with him but he’s got a chance to fix things, to make it right. Alex doesn’t look like he believes him and Mikey can’t blame him. He knows he doesn’t sound even remotely convincing. “Really, Alex, it-”

Alex nods. “I know, Mikey. It’s just-” he rubs underneath his jaw and steps backwards. Whatever he was going to say is pushed down underneath the layers of self-preservation that Mikey’s spent the last few days learning how to peel back. He doesn’t want Alex to close himself off again.

They approach the bunker and Alex pulls the heavy door open. Mikey allows himself a moment to watch the way Alex’s shirt pulls tight around his biceps, how the movements make his shirt lift a little, exposing the golden skin of his side. How his jeans cling to his ass and thighs. He wants to remember this, the way that Alex grew from the teenager he remembers to a handsome man, because he knows he’ll never see this Alex again.

The edison lamps cause a soft amber light to crawl up the mouth of the entrance to the bunker. Mikey swallows and follows Alex down, ignoring the way his palms sweat as they hit the cold concrete floor.

The object pulses viridian and cerulean, happy and innocuous, innocent and unaware of the turmoil it’s created. Mikey approaches slowly and he feels Alex reaching out like he wants to stop him. Mikey’s steps slow but he doesn’t stop.

He has to do this. It didn’t work the first time and he knows why.

“I know why it didn’t work the first time.” He blurts the words out and turns his head to see Alex’s eyebrows raise. The scar on the right side of his forehead puckers a little with the movement. Mikey wants to lean forward and kiss it, like it’d melt underneath the press of his lips. He knows it won’t, but he’d be lying if he thinks that there’s not a part of him that would want to stay here and try forever.

He reaches the table and looks back at Alex, tapping his fingers on the surface and fiddling with a socket wrench, spinning it around his finger just for something to do with his hands that doesn’t involve flattening his curls.

“There’s- I think there’s an element of want. I’m not sure how it works but it- I didn’t _want_ to leave. I wasn’t ready. Not really.”

He notices the moment Alex realises that this meant Michael really did want to leave. Michael really did want to be somewhere else. He spins the wrench again.

“And now?” Alex asks. 

“I’m ready.” Mikey replies with a nod of his head. 

Silence falls between them for a moment. Mikey feels like he’s trapped in a rom-com, that moment at the end when the date’s over and the atmosphere is heavy with anticipation for what might happen next.

Mikey breaks the silence when he can’t stand it anymore.

“You know when he’s back,” he starts, “don’t let yoursel-”

“I won’t,” Alex promises. Mikey misses having someone who can understand him without him having to fully finish verbalising a thought. He wishes it surprised him how quickly Alex learned to read him but it doesn’t. It never will. But he’ll miss it. 

“And make sure you-”

“I will,” he interrupts, warm smile doing little to allay Mikey’s concerns. “I’ve got a lot of work still to do but I’ll take better care of myself.”

Mikey wrinkles his nose. “That isn’t what I was going to say,” he argues but Alex just chuckles.

“It was.”

“Yeah, it was,” Mikey agrees, rubbing the back of his neck. “I- I’m gonna miss you.” 

He hates the way his voice hitches but more than that he hates the way Alex’s face falls. He wets his lower lip and turns fully to look at him. Mikey feels his chest tightening even as he leans his hips against the central table. It shifts slightly with his weight, legs screeching across the concrete. On the table, a few items jump and wobble with the unexpected movement. 

Alex’s jaw ticks. Mikey can see him processing the honesty. Processing how that makes him feel.

“Yeah,” he says gently, looking up from where his gaze had dropped to the floor to meet Mikey’s eyes head on. It’s no less breathtaking now than it had been when he’d seen Alex in the Pony. It’s no less breathtaking than that very first time that he’d met his Alex when they were children and all the air had been pulled out of his lungs; Alex Manes was a vacuum, Alex Manes was the black hole that he’d surrendered his life to explore. Alex Manes was the other half of his soul, the part of him that’s been missing for nearly a decade, the empty space in his mind and heart and body that was carved out in the shape of a man he lost before he could even call him his own.

Mikey can barely breathe as Alex finishes, “I’ll miss you too, Mikey.”

He’s not sure who moves first. He just knows that he’s in Alex’s arms again, clinging to him tightly and ignoring the wetness under his eyes, the way he can feel tears on his cheeks as they escape from his eyelids. His fingers twist in the fabric of Alex’s shirt and his breath chokes on a sob and he just breathes in.

Alex holds him tightly. It feels like goodbye. It is goodbye. 

“Thank you,” Mikey manages, voice thick and wobbling. He leans back and manages to smile at Alex, who looks a little puzzled at what he’s being thanked for. Mikey cups his cheek and answers Alex’s unspoken question. “I didn’t think I’d get to see him again. You might have had different p-paths in life but you-”

“It’s okay,” Alex interrupts, his lips curling into a smile that finally - _finally_ \- reaches his eyes. Mikey knows his weak laugh is watery and bubbling with tears. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Mikey leans away before he does something stupid, like kiss Alex. “I’m just glad I got to hold you again. One last time.” 

Alex’s eyes are shining. Mikey hates that he looks like he’s been sucker-punched, that he’s not used to such open, heartfelt honesty. He thinks he should have just used the machine before Alex arrived, saved them both the heartache of this moment. 

He detangles himself from Alex and walks back over to the table, or, at least, he starts walking back over to the table. Behind him, he hears Alex say “Mikey-” and he whirls on the spot, crosses the distance between them again and presses his lips against Alex’s.

The kiss is chaste. It lasts barely two seconds and Alex - sweet, _perfect_ Alex - doesn’t respond. Doesn’t return it. Mikey isn’t his Michael. And this Alex was never Mikey’s to love.

When Mikey goes to apologise, Alex only shakes his head. 

They say nothing else as Mikey approaches the table again, head hung and chin almost touching his chest. His fingers slide over the table and he looks around the room once more like he’s committing it to memory. He is. He’s remembering this last moment, trying to pack every detail into the recesses of his mind where he can protect it forever. He’s never going to see this again, after all.

He turns back to the table and touches the console. He curls his fingers around it, feeling a part of it detaching as he does so.

Here goes nothing.

He swallows and punches in the sequence, the clicking and whirring starting as it pulses brighter and brighter, light and sound filling the room.

Underneath the din of it all, he whispers _goodbye, Alex_ , and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he hears _bye, Mikey_ echoed back at him.

He closes his eyes: the light’s too bright for him to handle and he thinks that he’s going to be okay. He has to be okay. He’s going to make things right.

The world goes white, and then pitch dark and then very, _very_ silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> /o\ ILU guys?
> 
> We're nearly at the end! One chapter to go! Thank you to everyone - again - who has commented and kudos'd and screamed with me! 
> 
> Find me on [Tumblr](https://hannah-writes.tumblr.com) and say hi! :)


	10. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a horrible moment he thinks that he’s somehow hallucinating being home, because his hair feels like Mikey’s, but the bunker, as he looks around, is definitely his.
> 
> Wait. 
> 
> The bunker.
> 
> It’s filled with his shit. He’s _home_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thank you to [InsidiousIntent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsidiousIntent) for helping take this from fever-written keysmashing into something that makes sense!

The first thing he notices is that it’s  _ cold _ . It’s cold and his hand hurts. It’s the bone-deep ache of an injury that might have been physically healed but had left the kind of psychological scar that means it aches anyway, all the time. The mattress beneath him is lumpy and uneven because the bed’s propped up awkwardly on a block that’s slightly higher than the others under the top left leg. 

His head isn’t throbbing with the aftermath of a heavy night but he can feel the familiar sharp hurt that accompanies late nights and not enough sleep. He groans a little and rubs his hands over his face, pushes them through curls that feel far softer than he was expecting them to.

For a horrible moment he thinks that he’s somehow hallucinating being home, because his hair feels like Mikey’s, but the bunker, as he looks around, is definitely his.

Wait. 

The bunker.

It’s filled with his shit. He’s  _ home _ .

***

The machine’s broken. Or, at least, some fundamental parts of it have been taken out and moved around and Michael doesn’t know how to fix it. He’s not entirely sure that he wants to, if he’s honest, after what happened last time he thinks it’s probably a blessing in disguise. He figures he’ll be a bit more careful next time he’s messing around with objects from Antar that Alex comes across on his-

Alex.

The knowledge that Alex is here, on this planet, in this place, in this reality… that Alex is  _ alive _ rockets through Michael and ricochets off the walls of his mind. His first impulse is to go and find him, to drive out to the Valenti cabin and tug Alex into his arms, to wrap him up and not let him go until there was no doubt in anyone’s mind as to where they belong, that they belong together. Until the space under his arm that was built for Alex to curl against was fully reclaimed.

But his feet don’t move. 

He can’t go to Alex, not yet. Not when he has a lot of other wrongs to make right first.

Starting with Isobel. 

***

The Pony had exploded. The noise coming from everyone as they talked over each other was deafening. Isobel was afraid, worried that if this was real, then what had happened to her brother? What if he didn’t want to come back, having found somewhere where Alex was alive? What if he  _ couldn’t _ come back? Her eyes had shone, huge and bright and tearful at the thought of Mikey never coming home, and though Liz reached across the table, still sceptical of the truth of the situation (as she always was of situations she couldn’t use science to prove), Isobel was briefly inconsolable. 

Maria had just sat still, watching Michael’s face as everyone started worrying about Mikey, and how to bring him home. She watched and saw - he knew - the way he felt isolated. Alienated (hah). How for one brief moment he’d been swept up in the pretend reality that he could have made this work, that he could have pretended. He could have worked a little harder and just slipped into Mikey’s life. Maybe, even, he could have been happy here. After all, Mikey had a huge family that loved him. Isobel was happy here, so was Max. He had a mom and a dad that loved him and-

Kyle cleared his throat and tapped his empty glass on the table to get everyone’s attention.

“Okay,” he started, when quiet fell. “Obviously this isn’t what we were expecting when Isobel called us here and it’s not easy on anyone,” his eyes cut to Michael, “not even the one who’s telling us all of this is part of his reality. But everyone talking at the same time isn’t gonna help.”

“You’re right,” Liz agreed, turning those intense brown eyes on Michael. He hated being pinned under her scrutiny on a good day, let alone a night like this where he was too sober and too lonely to trust that he’d be able to cover up the truth with something beautiful.

Michael swallowed, suddenly feeling uncomfortably exposed. The cockiness that had come with people suddenly believing him drained away and all he was left with was the crawling sense of discomfort and not-belonging as everyone - including Isobel - let their gazes fall on him.

Liz’s hand settled on his and he looked down at it. He resisted the urge to squirm, even though it was hard.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, sincerely. “We should have noticed something was wrong.”

Michael shook his head. “I was avoiding you guys,” he said with a little smile, though it felt forced. “And the timing of my reality-switch was pretty good for you guys thinking that he would need space. Just my luck.”

What might have been a lame attempt at a joke fell very flat. Michael found himself wondering if his friends - the people he was close to in his reality - would be this emotionally in touch if they just let themselves be. If maybe this wasn’t a pipe dream and just… something they needed to work at?

Of course, that was assuming he could get home. Michael unscrewed the cap on the bottle and took a long pull on it, his other hand pushing through his curls.

“And-” he started, “I- I’m sorry too. I don’t even know if I can get home, but I won’t stop trying.”

Isobel nodded, not saying anything for an agonisingly long moment before she just pulled him into a hug. Michael went willingly, bonelessly, and hugged her back.

If he clung to her, just a little, nobody would say anything, right?

***

He doesn’t go to Isobel’s house. She’s hardly been there, he knows.  Despite him begging her to stop sleeping in the mines, she’s been there every hour she hasn’t been working, every hour she’s not been barely taking care of herself she’s been with Max. And since the town had become rather more sleepy as of late she hasn’t been able to throw herself into event planning with the same fervour she would have done before. She’s always used  _ things _ to distract herself from stuff she’d rather not think about or process. Without the ability to do  _ things _ , Michael’s always worried what she would do.

Right now, it’s reading Tolstoy. Or Dostoyevski.  _ Someone _ pretentious and Russian to Max’s floating form as though he can hear her.

It’s late when he reaches the caves. There’s an amber light flickering in the mouth as he approaches and a part of him - a part that sounds like Max - wants to tell her to be more careful, that having visible light shining out of the mouth of a cave was a dangerous move. Another part of him is quick to point out that he did something not too dissimilar when Isobel was in the pods. If Max wasn’t there, Michael was. They shared a vigil over her, passing like ships in the night.

He’d let Max go through thinking he was going to lose Isobel alone.

He’s been doing the same thing to Isobel and he hates himself for it.

His boots crunch on the sand and pebbles underfoot as he walks into the mouth of the cave and, for the first time in his life, he can feel the way his jeans scratch against his legs. He scowls at his thighs and then rubs his hands over his face. Fucking Mikey and his fucking Levis. 

“Iz?” 

He sees a blonde head of hair sitting, slouched and wrapped up in blankets that jump and jerk when he speaks. 

He hadn’t realised until that moment that part of the ache in his mind had gone. Like the moment he set eyes on her the pain of loneliness in his head receded. He feels… he feels almost whole again, the warm blanket of Isobel’s presence in his mind settling around him, soft and comfortable and right. 

Swallowing, he watches as she gets to her feet, tips her head and then - with eyes shining suspiciously until he feels the nudge of her mind against his - she almost trips over herself to get to him. He meets her halfway, tugging her into his arms as she throws herself at him and buries her face in his neck. His fingers sink into her hair and cradle her head, his other arm tightly locked around her waist. They’ll not talk about this afterwards, Isobel hates letting even her brothers see her in any position she considers weak. But as he hugs her close and feels the fine tremble of her body against his, he closes his eyes and just breathes. He does his best not to clutch at her, but it’s hard.

Isobel smells like rosewater and patchouli. He only knows the specifics because she’s been dragging him shopping with her so she doesn’t have to walk the aisles alone, running the risk of running into her mom’s friends and their piteous ‘poor Isobel, her husband ran out on her’ expressions. Michael’s never paid that much attention to smells, not really, outside of Alex. But he knows this is one he’ll never forget, that he’ll always pay attention to. 

He knows he’s taken a lot for granted, too much. He’s been wrapped up in his pain for so long that he’s forgotten the people in his life and that’s… that’s not okay. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, pressing a kiss to the side of her head. He cards his fingers through her hair and leans back to look at her. He doesn’t need to say anything, he can feel the fingertips of her mind against his again and he drops his head forward, resting his forehead against hers and lets her feel like home. 

***

They spend hours in the mines. The lights flicker and he sits on the floor, wrapped in a sleeping bag while Isobel returns to the chair. His head’s resting against her knee and occasionally she breaks from reading to touch his hair like she wants to make sure he’s still there.

“I can’t believe Max enjoys this shit,” Michael rumbles sleepily, glancing up and resting his chin on Isobel’s thigh, his lips curling up a little into an impish smile that Isobel’s helpless to not return. “You’re a good sister, you know.”

“He didn’t leave me,” Isobel says, an indecipherable sorrow on her face as she looks at Max in the pod, and then back at Michael, “so I won’t leave him.” 

She pokes his cheek. He feels the press of her nail against his skin.

“You’re a good brother,” she adds, and though her tone brokered no room for argument, Michael still does. He’s done things for his family, he’s lied and he’s obstructed, he’s covered up deaths and let it ruin his life but that doesn’t make him a good brother. Definitely doesn’t make him a good person. All the things he’s done… he doesn’t know if that’s ever going to be an adjective he can use to describe himself.

“I’m not,” he tells her, softly, “but I’ll be better.”

***

Heading back to the Airstream briefly crosses his mind but Isobel’s fingers catch his wrist when she finally admits defeat and accepts that the chill in the air is too much for the blankets to keep at bay. Michael, for his sins, ached in places he didn’t think could. But he’s spent hours sitting on the cold floor with nothing but a sleeping bag and a blanket to keep him warm and cushioned he was bound to ache. 

“See you at mine?” She asks and Michael just nods his head, not even hesitating. 

The look of relief on Isobel’s face makes Michael reach out to hug her again and she twists her fingers in the fabric of his shirt and Michael thinks he hears her say that she’s sorry, but before he can ask her what she’s apologising for she’s breezing away from him.

“Do you have any idea what she’s apologising for?” he asks Max’s still form. 

Max doesn’t answer. Michael scoffs a little at himself and walks closer, kicking at a stray pebble. It skitters away, the sound echoing off the walls. 

“I’m sorry to you, too,” he tells Max. He walks closer and presses his fingers against the pod, left hand splayed, unscarred and undamaged. “This situation’s all of your own damn making, but we shouldn’t have left you alone. Iz and I both knew you weren’t okay, and you’ve never been able to make sensible decisions when the Ortechos are involved. Fuck, Max-  you’re a fucking idiot.”

Tapping the pod with two fingers in a parting gesture, Michael turns on his heel.

“I’ll fix it,” he promises. “We’ll work out how to bring you back.” 

He heads to the mouth of the cave and looks back once more. “I miss you, man. Nap it off and come back to us, okay? We can’t do this without you.”

***

By the time he gets to Isobel’s place, she’s been back for a while, or so he assumes. He lingered in the mines a little longer, just looking at Max and picking up, folding the sleeping bags to make sure no snakes sneak in overnight to keep warm and spring out to surprise - or hurt - Isobel when she returned. He shook everything out and only left when he was sure she’d be okay.

The lights are on and her car’s in the drive. He parks up, pulling in behind her and turning off the truck. Flexing his fingers around the steering wheel, he takes a few deep breaths before he steps out and heads up to the door.

Isobel’s house is the same. He wants to tell her that she should lock the door but reminds himself that a) he’s not Max and b) she  _ was  _ expecting him and knows him well enough to know he wouldn’t have his keys on him. Even so, as he steps in he closes and locks it behind himself. Noah might be gone, dead and buried - Michael had only gone to the funeral to support Isobel, otherwise he would have just fucked it off and spent the day trying to work on the cure to bring Max back - but he still worried for Isobel. His sister. He’s walked through fire for her, and he’d do it again in a heartbeat but he knows he has to do better at other things. Letting her in. Letting her help him, letting her be there when she wants to be. Trusting her with his hurts, his secrets. Stop pushing her away, pushing her out. 

He wants the same relationship with his Isobel that Mikey does with his. He knows, he  _ knows _ that they can have it, they’re not too far off the mark. They used to be. Seeing Mikey’s Isobel makes him long for the close relationship of their teenage years, where he only lied to her about the brutality of his foster homes to keep her from knowing the truth. Where that was the only lie that ever crossed his lips when he looked at her and she asked him how he was. 

Now he wonders if he even knows how to tell the truth anymore. Exhaustion sits heavy on his shoulders, he feels it weighing him down and he sighs heavily, shuffling further into the house. He hasn’t missed the ‘For Sale’ sign hanging out the front and hates that he’s missed her making that decision, too.

“Hey, Iz?” he calls, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it up as he moves along the hall and into the large open plan lounge-kitchen area. It’s lit up, the lights throwing the room into an amber relief. “Iz?”

There’s two coffee cups on the table and an abandoned sandwich. 

“...Iz?” 

He hears a sound behind him and turns on the spot, about to ask her why she didn’t answer him when the words die on his lips. 

“ _ Alex _ .” 

His breath leaves him in a rush. The world rockets to a halt fast enough that he feels dizzy. Alex is there in a cream sweater and wearing glasses. Why does Alex need glasses? Does Alex wear glasses? He presses his lips together and his fingers curl around a nearby chair, using it to steady himself. 

"Alex-" he says again and Alex lifts a tired hand to stop him from moving. 

"Don't," he starts, pushing his glasses up his nose and shuffling closer, avoiding moving into Michael's space to grab one of the cups of coffee. Michael wonders - less absently than maybe he wants to - how Alex takes his coffee and realises that he really doesn't know.

He should ask Isobel.

He adds it to his list of things to do.

"What're you doing here?"

"Me?" Alex asks, eyebrows lifting. "What am I doing here? Looking af-"

"We've been spending more time together," Isobel interrupts, bumping Alex's shoulder gently as she lets herself into the conversation. She picks up the other coffee cup.

"I'm not-"

"-Mikey," Alex finishes and Michael thinks he sees Alex's shoulders slump slightly, "I know. Isobel told me you were back. He figured out how to reverse the machine."

"And how it worked in the first place," Isobel adds, sitting down at the table and pushing the sandwich plate in Alex's direction. Alex just looks at it and pushes it back towards her.

Michael watches the two of them have a silent battle of wills, feeling like an outsider for a moment before he presses his lips together and sits down heavily.

"I don't know what happened," he says honestly. "I was just looking at it, trying some sequences. I thought it'd maybe hold some-"

"What were you thinking?" 

Isobel's question doesn't startle him. That's not the right word. The tone of her question is disarming. Slightly aggressive. Underpinned with a hurt and an anger that he hadn't been expecting. He rubs his fingers over his forehead, pushes the tip of his index finger against his temple and opens his mouth to reply, only to be cut off again.

"Michael, you- that machine sent you away  _ because you wanted to leave _ ." He hates the sound her voice makes when it cracks over the word 'leave', the way she looks so hurt and worried and sad. 

"No I-"

Alex's eyebrows lift again. Michael watches his forehead crease and feels his chest tighten in wanton affection. It grows inside his chest, putting pressure on the inside of his ribcage and it hurts. 

"That's how it works," Alex says with a sigh. That resigned sound that makes Michael want to curl around him until whatever it is that's made him sound that way has gone. He feels that, most of the time, the cause of that tone is him. "The machine. It's driven partly by desire."

"Our- Our people use dumb ways to control things," Isobel offers, putting her coffee down to inspect her nails, but Michael can see the way that she's looking at him in her peripheral vision. She's weighing him up like she's trying to gauge how the conversation's going to go. 

"You jumped into another reality because you wanted to be anywhere but here." 

Michael stares at Alex. He's speaking in such a flat, factual tone that he might as well be reading the shipping forecast. But Michael can see the way Alex's jaw ticks slightly, how the line of his brow is slightly furrowed. Behind his glasses, his eyes are dark and hurting and worried. 

"I was really drunk," Michael admits. "Drunk and feeling sorry for myself and-"

"-and you thought your only solution was to leave?" Isobel asks, "You thought the best solution to your problem was to just leave us? Leave me and Max? Find somewhere  _ better _ ?"

"I wouldn't say it was better," Michael protests, looking at Isobel but his gaze keeps drifting back to Alex. Even tired and unhappy, he looks so alive and after having almost come to terms with the idea that he was never going to be able to see him again, Michael can't help but see just how  _ beautiful _ Alex is. "Mikey had a stupid job."

"Mikey has three PhDs and a really prestigious teaching job," Alex points out. Michael feels his chest clench in something like jealousy at what he thinks is pride in Alex's voice. 

"He got adopted and has a family," Isobel adds, though she sounds less proud and they both look worried at how Michael might take that comment.

Michael taps his fingers on the table, irritated by their assessment that Mikey's life was 'better'. Yeah, maybe it was better, but he didn't have Alex. 

"And? I have a family."

That takes the wind out of Isobel's sails. Her eyes widen and he can hear the way her breath shakes as she breathes in sharply. He feels the nudge of her powers against his mind and he just tilts his head a little. 

 

_ You're my family, Iz, _ he tells her, and he knows she can hear it. They don't use mind-speech often, not as often as she and Max do. He can't remember the last time he actively spoke to Isobel without using his words, maybe it was before they were separated, before she was taken away to become Isobel Evans. Before she was ripped from his mind, creating that festering wound that never really healed. 

He wants it to heal. 

He wants everything to heal.

She curls her fingers around his hand and pulls him back to the present.

"Sure, I don't have the same last name as you guys but you're my family." 

He watches the relief on Isobel's face, the way it makes her look so much younger when she smiles and looks at him like she loves him. He feels it rush around him like a hug, a balm that makes almost all of the aches of his soul slip away and cool down, calm and settled even if it's only temporarily.

He's distracted by the feeling that he almost misses the sound of Alex's chair scraping across the floor as he gets up.

"I'm glad you're back," he says to Michael and Michael can see the way the guards have fallen back down over his eyes. 

"You don't have to leave," Michael says and it feels so familiar to that time in the Pony where Alex told him that the world ended with a whimper that he wants to stuff the words back into his mouth and pull them out of the air.

Alex, it seems, has the same sense of deja-vu as his lips curl up sadly into a little smile and he shakes his head.

"I was on my way out," he says and it's half-hearted, their own in joke that Isobel doesn't understand.

"You weren't," she tells him, confused. 

Michael meets Alex's eyes and the laugh that they share is soft. Soft and filled with heartache. 

"It's a long story, Isobel," he tells her gently. "But you two have some catching up to do and I... I have work to be getting on with." 

Isobel nods, "Thank you," she says, "for everything."

Michael watches Alex lift his shoulders in a shrug. "What're friends for?" he asks, eyes lingering on Michael and Michael thinks - knows - he's done something wrong but he doesn't know what that is. 

"I'll see you around, Gu- Michael," Alex offers and Michael feels his chest swell again. Alex called him Michael. "Don't worry, Isobel, I'll see myself out. But- I am glad you're back."

Michael, struck with stupidity as so often seems to happen around Alex, lets him walk out.

***

The Pony's quiet. It always is in the early afternoon, before Roswell's drunks appear at opening time to sit in their stools, the ones that have ass grooves worn down from years of being in the same place. Michael's never been one of those drunks, he's always come later in the evening when Maria's busy and he can steal a bottle over the bar and they pretend she doesn't notice. When there are enough drunk people around that he can start a fight if he needs to, something sharp and quick to numb the existential pain of his life.

He thumbs his lower lip as he pushes the door open. The Pony has a distinct smell about it, and though Maria has a strict cleaning regime - he knows because he's helped her on more than one occasion - it still smells like stale beer, testosterone and unresolved issues. It smells reassuring because Michael knows this place. 

That doesn't stop him feeling anxious as he walks in, though. 

Maria's sitting with her back to the door, and though he can't see what she's doing, the slight movement of her shoulders tells him she's probably shuffling her Tarot. 

"We're closed," she calls, not looking over her shoulder. Michael's always believed she's got to be at least a little bit psychic on account of the fact that she always knows when he's walking in, even if he's careful not to make any noise. "We don't open for another half an hour."

"I know," he says. He watches Maria go still, freeze where she’s seated and she takes in a slow breath. "Was hoping we could... talk?"

He doesn't come any closer than he already has, hovering behind her and unsure of his welcome. He chews on the inside of his lip and tugs his hat off, holding it against his chest in a way that's more protective than anything else. 

She still doesn't move.

"Maria," he starts, "c'mon, please? I- This has been a wild week and I-"

"Okay."

"Okay?"

She turns to look at him and he sees the sadness in her eyes. The sadness he put there. He swallows and moves a little closer, and when she doesn't stop him, he settles on a stool one away from her. He can feel her eyes on him and it's so familiar to the Maria from the other world and to the Maria he knew before he messed everything up that he smiles, lets out a soft breath and lifts his eyes. 

His hat's on the bar and he takes his fingers off it, shifting to face her properly and he reaches out to take her hand. The movement's slow, telegraphed. It gives Maria a chance to pull away if she doesn't want him to touch her but she doesn't. 

Michael can't quantify the relief that courses through him when she doesn't pull away, though the look on her face, the suspicion, doesn't immediately recede. 

"You- you wouldn't believe me even if I told you about the week I've just had," Michael starts, squeezing her fingers softly. "But I- I've had- it's been-"

Fuck.

It's harder than he thought it would be to put this into words. 

He wets his lower lip and Maria's quiet, patient, just looking at him with those doe eyes and Michael thinks in another time, in another place... in another  _ life _ he could have fallen in love with her so deeply. He knows it in his bones.

"I'm sorry," is what he goes with, saving stumbling over his words for another time. "You were right. You are right, you deserve better than me."

"That's not what I mea-"

"It's the truth, though. You deserve someone who- I mean, you were right. And I'm sorry I hurt you." 

He's on a roll, so he carries on, one hand rubbing the back of his neck even as he keeps a gentle hold of Maria's fingers with his other hand.

"I should never have dragged you into my shit."

"It takes two to do what we did," she points out, not unkindly, and Michael (platonically) loves her for it.

"I know, but I had more information than you and you- well, you said it. I was an asshole and I hurt you and that's not okay."

Maria nods. She doesn't say anything for a moment, the silence stretches between them for an uncomfortably long time before she speaks again. Michael was about to make his awkward exit, shuffling out of the bar.

"No more lies," she says, catching his left hand between hers. "I don't need to know all your secrets, or what's going on between you all that you won't tell me - but you should. Just tell me this."

She smooths her thumb over the healed skin of Michael's hand.

"This. However this happened, however you healed this... can it help my mom?"

Michael's mind whirs; he hasn't thought about if Max's healing could help someone whose mind is degrading. He couldn't help Isobel when she was poisoned. 

"I don't think so," he tells her and watches her face fall. He turns his hand quickly, so he can catch her fingers. "But if I find out that it can? I promise you, you'll be the first to know."

She looks at him and Michael, despite his discomfort in doing so, holds eye contact. She isn't reading him, he likes to think he'd know what that feels like, but she's staring him down and trying to work out if he's telling her the truth. 

It feels like hours before she nods her head, though it's probably only seconds. 

"Okay." She's not happy that he's still keeping things from her, but he supposes that's why she asked for him not to lie to her anymore. Secrets were one thing. Lies, another. "Thank you."

He nods. "I miss you," he adds, "I miss being able to come in here to talk."

Maria's eyebrow lifts and she shakes her head. "You can't say things like that right now, Guerin." His chest clenches, that fear he's put a foot wrong rolling over him like a truck. "Not yet." 

Instead of apologising, though, he just nods his head. "Okay." Because if she needs more time he can give that to her. He can let her have all the time she needs to go back to being able to call him her least favourite customer. All the time she needs to go back to telling him he smells like a river and how she'd never want him to have her number. 

"Okay," she echoes.

Michael, thinking this is a good time to leave, gets to his feet and touches her shoulder. She lifts her fingers and touches his wrist, squeezing it once before letting go. 

"See you later," he offers and, as he collects his hat and walks away, he hears her laugh to herself. 

He's about seven paces from the door and he stops, turning back.

"Hey, DeLuca?"

She pauses and turns on the stool again.

"Guerin, don't you have more apologies to make?" 

"How does Alex take his coffee?"

Maria frowns, partly in thought and partly in confusion as to why Michael's asking her how Alex takes his coffee. 

"Black, three sugars. Why?"

"I never knew." The confession's soft, and though he says it quietly he knows Maria hears. "What's his-"

"Ask him yourself," Maria interjects, stopping the questions before they escape him. "If you don't know, and you want to,  _ ask _ ." She pauses for a second before she waves her hand. "Now get outta here, you'll scare off my customers."

Michael, despite everything, laughs and tips his hat in her direction as he puts it back on his head.

To Alex's, he supposes. 

To the hardest conversation of them all.

To the conversation he's been looking forward to having and dreading in equal parts since he woke up in his bunker knowing he was home.

***

 

He takes a detour before going out to Alex's cabin. He stops by the Airstream and has a shower. He shaves. He shakes out his jeans and glares at them, and then despairs of himself because of course he's gotten used to the softness of Mikey's Levis. Of course, it was easy to fall into the comfort of jeans that cost seventy-five bucks a pair when all he's known are $10 jeans from the nearest Old Navy or Walmart when Isobel’s annoyed with him getting everything he owns from Goodwill. 

There's a long-forgotten product that Isobel gave him once sitting in the bathroom and he tries to use it on his hair, intending on at least making an effort to look presentable for someone who may not even want to see him. He pushes it through his hair and leaves, letting the sun dry his curls as he procrastinates leaving by rearranging the deck chairs outside his trailer, moving the trailer back across to hide the entrance to his bunker properly and feeling glad that no one's visited recently. 

The sun's high in the sky, now, and it's gone midday. Michael thinks about waiting, spending today doing nothing but working himself up and going to see Alex in the morning but it's been too long. Too long since he's felt like he can fully breathe in, too long since he's had full lung capacity because Alex has been purposefully kept and keeping out of his orbit. 

If this experience has taught him anything, it's that he needs Alex. That he wants Alex. That he  _ loves  _ Alex. He can't change that for the world. He wouldn't. He knows now that he’s been wrapped up in grief and anger for too long, that Alex isn’t a crash landing and it’s unfair of him to blame Alex for what his family has done, when Alex has done nothing but try to dismantle it, nothing but try to  _ help _ . Even when Michael pushed him away. Even when he ended up alone because of it.

_ Fuck _ .

He climbs into his truck when he runs out of reasons to procrastinate and pulls out of the junkyard. 

He stops off at the Crashdown, and then at Bean Me Up on his way through Roswell, though.

He wants to be prepared. This could be a long conversation, and Michael - technically  _ Mikey _ , when he was here - hasn’t eaten properly in fucking days.

***

To say Michael amped himself up on the drive through Roswell and out the other side towards Alex's cabin was an understatement. To say Michael worked himself into an anxious frenzy as he drives through Roswell and out the other side towards Alex's cabin was  _ also _ an understatement. 

By the time Michael arrives at the cabin, windows down to try and counterbalance his soaring temperature due to anxiety and the fear that their perpetual curse of bad timing would strike here, too, he feels like he's a wreck.

As he pulls the car to a halt and kills the engine, rakes his fingers through his curls - again - Michael wonders if it's too late to back out and try this tomorrow.

Alex, however, is sitting outside on the porch, squinting slightly in the sun and carefully easing himself to his feet which looks like it kind of hurts judging by the wince on his face and- and  _ fuck _ , Michael isn't ready.

He's so far from 'ready' that it's laughable that he's even here but he's been spotted and Alex is ambling down the steps towards him and if he drives away now... 

If he drives away now it might be the last straw. If he drives away now, he’ll never know if Alex really is pleased to see him because the next time they meet it’ll have given Alex the time he needs to pull his protective mask in place, to lock down the shutters that he uses to keep people - Michael - out.

He can’t do that. He’s tired of being on the outside of everything that he wants. 

"Hey," is what Michael says instead of starting the car and slamming it into reverse. "You busy?" is what he asks instead of swinging his truck dramatically onto the main road at the end of the dirt-track that leads to the cabin.

"No," is what Alex says instead of throwing him out on his ass. "You wanna come in?"

***

Michael isn't completely sure how he gets from the truck into the cabin but it happens. Somehow. Then he's sitting on the couch with the coffee from Bean Me Up and the bag from the Crashdown on the cluttered coffee table.

Alex, he's always thought, isn't a clutter kind of person. But then again he's also always considered that Alex probably has perfect eyesight and that's already been proven to be an incorrect assumption.

Michael sets himself up to be proven wrong on a number of assumptions. He's also setting himself up to have a conversation he'd rather have with the dutch courage of a dozen whiskey and acetone shots down him first. But he's got to do better than that for himself as much as for anyone else. 

Maybe for himself  _ more  _ than for anyone else. 

He rubs his hands on his thighs and pushes the cardboard coffee container towards Alex.

"That one's yours," he says and watches Alex sit down heavily in the armchair, since Michael's ended up on the couch. 

Alex leans forward and takes it, looking more grateful for coffee than he would have expected. Michael definitely doesn't watch in (slightly) anxious anticipation as Alex pops open the lid and breathes it in, then takes a sip.

He doesn't realise he's holding his breath until he lets it out at Alex's surprised - but pleased - expression.

"How'd you-?" The question hangs unfinished because he sips it again, curling both hands around the styrofoam cup. Michael idly thinks that they should probably switch to something less terrible for the environment. He'll leave it in the comment box next time.

"Would you believe me if I said lucky guess?" Michael asks with a hesitant smile. The arch of Alex's eyebrow tells him no so he ducks his head, plucks at a loose thread on the inside seam of his jeans. "I asked Maria." 

Alex's fingers tighten around the cup slightly at Maria's name.

"And I got food. At least I know what you like to order from the Crashdown. It might be kinda cold now but- I mean-"

"Thanks."

Michael can feel himself trying to reach out, mentioning Maria was a wrong move, he thinks, but he can salvage this.

"I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry." 

That takes the wind out of Alex's sails a little. Whatever he thought Michael was going to say, that isn't it. 

Emboldened, a little, because it's so rare to be able to catch Alex off guard, Michael starts talking. 

"I'm sorry I left you and I didn't come back, I was- god, Alex, I was out of my mind and that- I know- I know that's not an excuse for leaving you, and for going to Maria when I should have come to you first and-"

Michael blows out a breath, tells himself to  _ slow down _ , Alex isn't going anywhere and he has time. He has time to talk to Alex. He has all the time in the world as long as Alex will give it to him.

He's going to make himself worthy of it. Of Isobel and Max. Of Maria. Of Liz. Of  _ Alex _ . 

"Okay." He takes another breath in, lets it fill his lungs and forces himself to start again. "That was a rough night," he continues, more slowly.

"I know," Alex cuts in calmly, sipping the coffee. "First Caulfield," Michael flinches and he's not proud of it because he knows Alex sees, "and then Noah, and Max... that was a rough forty-eight hours." 

"You can say that again," Michael offers, going for a joke but it comes out tired and sadder than he'd intended. 

"I get it, you know," Alex tells him softly. Michael blinks, not expecting that perhaps Alex might have wanted to talk too. Chalk one more up to him being caught up in his own bubble. 

"Get what?"

"Why you went to Maria." 

Michael hears the world crashing around his ears. 

"No, you-"

"I do." It's said sadly, like Alex has resigned himself to whatever conclusion he's reached. "After all, it was-"

"If you say it was your family that did all that stuff," Michael interrupts, "Well, I mean you're-" He swallows. "You're not <wrong>, but none of that's your fault."

Alex has an unhappy set to his lips, a look on his face that Michael instinctively knows means Alex is set to argue with him about how this is all his fault.

"It's not. Not how the Air Force handled the Crash fifty years before you were born. Not how your dad ran Shepherd. Not Caulfield. Not how he got into your fucking head." Michael swallows, pushes his hand through his hair. "Not how I- not how I misunderstood and misinterpreted all the shit you were trying to do."

Alex closes his mouth. Michael takes it as tacit permission to continue. 

"In the immediate aftermath," Michael says, "I did blame you. Or... sort of. No that's-? I never actually held you accountable for- Fuck." Alex looks like he's frozen. Michael knows that was the wrong thing to say. "Let me start again. I don't blame you. For any of it. I- Fuck, Alex, I've never blamed you for what your family did. It's not your fault. But in the- like right after it happened, my head was a  _ mess  _ and everything was all tangled up together."

Alex just nods and the larger-than-he-wants-to-admit part of Michael that exists purely to try and protect Alex wants to push everything aside and sit on the arm of the chair, tug Alex into his arms and hold him until that sorrow disappears from his eyes. To hold Alex until the doubt Michael can see has disappeared and the sharp, tense line of Alex's shoulders has relaxed. He aches to do  _ something _ but he doesn’t move.

“And that- that wasn’t fair.” He breathes in, looks at his knees but he’s watching Alex out of the corner of his eye like that’d stop him wanting to close the space between them. “It wasn’t fair of me to equate you with-”

“It’s totally fair,” Alex interrupts. Michael wishes he wouldn’t do that. “Most of the bad things in your life can be blamed, directly or indirectly, on my family. It was a Manes that responded to the call in ‘47, who made the call to lock the survivors up. If Harlan Manes hadn’t done that, you-”

“Woah woah  _ woah _ !” It’s Michael’s turn to interrupt. “Jesus, Alex! Literally none of that is  _ your  _ fault. Christ, is this what happens when you’re left alone for too long? You try to take on everything that’s wrong in the world like you’re Atlas?”

Fuck, Michael thinks for a moment, he’s spent too long with Max to be making a reference like that. He shakes his head. “I get that some of that feeling’s my fault, ‘cause I definitely didn’t handle everything well. Running away from you when you- when you finally were ready to join me where I’d been for a while wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“But it makes sense.” Michael wants to scream. Alex has to stop being so reasonable; Michael wants the hurt, the fire. The resignation in his tone, the acceptance that he deserves to be alone makes him ache. It also makes him think about Mikey. How Mikey probably treated Alex. How maybe, what Alex really wants right now is another Michael that’s not fucked in the head. That doesn’t come with a load of baggage. 

It makes something cold slide down Michael’s throat and sit, unhappily in the pit of his stomach. But he’s started, so he has to finish.

“Maybe I needed space,” he admits. Alex nods, like something he’s been thinking has been proven to be correct and Michael bites back on the urge to just spill his soul. Those kinds of conversations have never worked out well for him in the past. Grand gestures and huge statements mean relatively little when he doesn’t know the coffee preferences of the man he loves. “Maybe I needed to just- figure my shit out. Sort my head out. You were right. That was an insane twenty-four hours and I just- God, Alex, I’d just watched my only hope at learning where I’d come from blow up in my face, I’d just-” 

He knows his voice cracks then, Alex’s brows crease in that expression Michael knows means Alex is feeling his pain. Alex has always been more empathetic than he’s wanted anyone to know. Or maybe it’s just for Michael. He realises he has no idea, it’s just one more thing of the many that he doesn’t know. One of the many things he wants to learn. 

“But that doesn’t mean,” he continues, “that I should’ve run away from you. Or that I should’ve run to Maria. I owed you a conversation before I went to her. I owed her better than to-” 

He rubs his hands over his face and gets to his feet, restless and needing to do something with the energy humming under his skin. There’s plenty of trinkets here, but he doesn’t think Alex would appreciate Michael just idly lifting and twirling them in the air to burn off his anxious energy. 

Alex says nothing.

“I spoke to Maria already,” he offers. Alex sips his coffee. The food from the Crashdown’s forgotten. He thinks (hopes) Alex has a microwave. “Needed to clear the air with her so that when I- when I came here I had a clean slate.” 

He paces between the bookshelf and the coffee table. This place is cramped. Michael’s Airstream is small but it’s never felt as claustrophobic as this space, cluttered with objects that aren’t his, aren’t Alex’s. Alex is a guest in this place that he’s calling home, filled with things that he doesn’t own. Probably because Alex doesn’t own much. Michael’s chest clenches again at the thought that Alex probably really only feels like he owns a fucked up legacy and the concerns of a genetic predisposition to destroy the things he loves. 

“You wanted to start over,” he says. “I want that too. I wanna know you, Alex. The way friends know each other. The way-”

He swallows. Alex is just watching him, his expression inscrutable but the coffee’s going cold and it looks like he’s not breathing, just waiting, frozen in this moment. Michael wants to make the most of it. 

He doesn’t wring his hands together, but they do push through his hair, latch at the back of his neck and his elbows touch as he forces a breath out of his chest. His lungs feel like they’re only at half capacity but once he’s spoken, whatever the outcome, he knows it’ll be a little easier to breathe. 

“I- I know I’m a mess. I’m not Mikey, with his three degrees and his fancy job and nice house. And I know he’s… probably really good with words and shit in places where I’m not.” He doesn’t look at Alex, focuses on the floor between Alex’s feet. “He’s like, the perfect fucking guy for you and I hate him for that, because now I- I’d understand if you’d be comparing me to him and finding me lacking, or whatever.”

He glances up only to beg Alex with his eyes to close his mouth and not interrupt. He needs to get this out. 

“I hurt everyone and that was shitty of me. I got a lot of making up to do and I’ve started it where I can. I’m not- I’m not good at this but I wanna be. I wanna be better for Isobel and Max. I wanna be the friend Maria deserves and you-”

His breath leaves him in a rush. “Alex, I just- I wanna  _ be _ for you. Whatever you’ll-” He doesn’t see Alex getting up but he can feel it. He’s always had a really good radar for Alex in his space, or near his space, being somewhere close to him Michael’s senses have always been dialled up to eleven where Alex is concerned. Time and space mean relatively little when the atoms of his being respond to Alex’s presence. 

But Alex is standing in front of him, now. He isn’t smiling. Michael doesn’t want to try and understand Alex’s expression because he might get it wrong, and if he gets it wrong and makes another assumption they could be back at square one and that wouldn’t help anyone. 

“I get it,” he says, finally. He swallows past the lump in his throat and drops his hands to his sides, thumbs sliding into the belt loops of his jeans, “you know? If I’ve hurt you too much. I’ve- I’ve been hurt too, all those times you walked away? It killed me, Alex, but I get that I didn’t understand. I don’t know, maybe you were tryna protect me? But- I- if there’s too much hurt for us to be together I get it.” 

He rocks forward, Alex responds by lifting his chin a little and making eye contact. He wets his lower lip and Michael’s gaze is drawn down to it. He wants to close that gap so badly, he wants to kiss Alex until their bodies fuse. He wants to hide himself in the curve of Alex’s neck and wrap his arms around Alex’s waist and bury himself in Alex until the world’s nothing but them and that moment and their souls twisting together. He doesn’t. 

“But I need you.” Michael can see Alex is taken aback by that. “I need you in my life, however you’ll have me. I can’t- I can’t do this without you. And I- I love you, Alex. I always have. I probably always will and I’m sorry that I- I understand if you just wanna be friends.” 

After all, compared to someone like Mikey, who was he? 

“I know I’m not him.” He knows he's repeating himself but he thinks it's important that Alex knows. "And even if I tried really hard there's no way I'd ever be anywhere near his level of fucking competence but-"

Alex closes the gap between them and reaches out, curls his fingers in the fabric of Michael's shirt where it sits on his shoulders and interrupts him again.

"I don't want Mikey," he says, and Michael's stomach swoops and flops and twists, in so many conflicting directions that Michael feels dizzy, he doesn’t dare breathe in, just in case he somehow manages to fuck this moment up, break the spell. "I want  _ you _ ." His thumbs smooth over Michael's collarbone. "But if we're gonna do this, we do it right."

Michael just nods and lifts his hands carefully, sliding them down Alex's arms and settling them at his waist. Alex steps forward into his space and closes his eyes as Michael leans down until their foreheads are touching. 

"Yeah," Michael echoes quietly, "that sounds good to me." He breathes out, lifts his hands to cradle Alex's face. "I can't do that again," he confesses, soft and breathless, "living in a world without you is- I-"

"It's okay," Alex soothes, "I'm here." When Michael opens his eyes, it's to see Alex looking at him. "I don't look away, Guerin," he murmured, lips curled up slightly, "and I'm done running away. If you're in, I'm in."

Michael's got no fucking idea how to do it right, but he's going to learn. 

He breathes out a soft laugh and nods his head.

"I'm in," he says, "I'm so fucking in." 

Alex's arms slide around his shoulders and tug him into a tight hug and Michael tucks his face into that spot right on the curve of Alex's neck and feels like he's finally home.

***

He doesn’t stay the night. Partly because Alex’s cabin doesn’t have a proper bed (which he realises is something else he should have known and had immediately started drawing up plans to build him an additional room before realising he’s getting carried away and definitely should  _ ask _ if that’s what Alex wants first before just assuming he knows), and partly because he doesn’t want them to fall back into their old habits. 

He leaves after another half an hour and heads back to his Airstream and ignores the cold that ripples down his body where Alex should be. 

They meet up again the next day, this time, Michael decides to be a little less emotionally heavy. He brings the ingredients to make pancakes and stands in Alex's kitchen while Alex, adorably rumpled and tired and slightly confused stands with his shoulder and temple leaning against the doorframe. 

It feels... domestic.

Michael likes it.

During that morning, Alex apologises for walking away. He tells Michael that he should never have let his father get into his head like he did, that he'd become someone so much stronger than the teenager he'd been when Jesse Manes had taken a hammer to Michael's hand and smashed his future to pieces. Or, at least, taken the first step towards smashing Michael's future to pieces. 

They sit side by side on the couch, bodies touching from knee to shoulder. Michael hesitates for only a moment before he stretches his arm out across the back of the couch. Alex doesn't hesitate as he leans in a little closer and rests his head on Michael's shoulder, tucks himself underneath Michael's arm.

They don't move again for hours. 

They don't do much of anything, to be honest, for hours. They enjoy each other's company and after a long period of comfortable silence, Michael punctures it by asking Alex a question.

By the time they've run out of questions to ask each other and honest answers to give - for now - it's mid-afternoon and their stomachs are rumbling.

The Crashdown might be a familiar place for a not-date first date, but it's exactly what they need as they laugh over burgers and milkshakes and Michael listens in rapt fascination as Alex tells him stories about growing up here, about Liz and Rosa and Maria. Michael watches as Alex talks about being a teenager without flinching.

He's radiant. Michael’s so in love he doesn’t know what to do with himself and it culminates in a kiss goodbye at Alex’s door, on the porch, the light pattering of the rain the perfect cover to hide the disappointed sound Michael makes when Alex pulls away and tells him  _ goodnight, Michael. _

***

When the letter falls to the floor, Michael almost misses it. He's cleaning up, tarpaulin pulled back on his console. It glitters and gleams, iridescence calling to him to touch. The final piece Alex gave him a month and a half ago sits on the floor. Michael hasn't put it together because he knows it's the final piece. The artefact sits there incomplete, aching for the piece that Alex gave him, wanting to be together, whole, seamlessly completed in a way Michael  _ knows _ .

But he doesn't want to accidentally mess up again, by activating more Antaran technology he doesn't fully understand. Though he thinks it's a control console of some kind he's more cautious now than he was before. He understands now that he’s always had something to lose, but it finally feels real, finally  _ feels _ like he has something to lose. Sort of. Maybe. They're days away from cracking the serum that'll help them wake Max up and the weather's rumbling and rolling with an oncoming storm. Theoretically, they're hoping they can juice themselves up, the same way Max did. Even if they can't, the static in the air should be a start. His family's almost complete and Alex... Alex is there for every step of it. 

He looks down as he hears the soft thwump of folded up paper hitting the floor. It isn't his notepad, though the yellow paper is definitely <from> one of his pads.

Michael puts the machine back down warily. It's broken, there are bits missing from the inside and one of the consoles has been removed so he'll never be able to use it again even if he wanted to, but he still won't risk it.

He rubs his fingers together before picking the letter up, sinking down into the chair. It groans a little with the movement, Michael's legs stretching out in front of him as he leans back into it.

Unfolding the paper, Michael feels his eyebrow lift as an unfamiliar, yet familiar, hand greets him.

His lips move as he reads the words, a short but to the point letter from Mikey. His first instinct is to ball it up, throw it in the corner of the bunker and ignore it forever. Maybe accidentally set it on fire but when he re-reads the words he thinks about Alex's  _ I want you _ , and the way that Alex is letting him in slowly, how they've been spending more time together these past few days than they have in ten years of almosts and near misses, of hushed conversations pressed against sweat-slick skin that dissolve in the morning light and-

_ Love him, the way I know you do. _

It's strange, he thinks, that he doesn't feel superior to Mikey in the way he thought he might. He doesn't feel like he's  _ won _ something, just because Alex chose him. Because Alex loves  _ him _ . If anything, there's an aching sadness that creeps through him, a sorrow that takes his breath away momentarily at the realisation that Mikey gave Alex up for him. 

That Mikey sacrificed his chance to be with Alex again to give Michael his. To give him the second chance he’s still not sure he deserves but he sure as hell isn’t going to waste.

He knows Mikey can't hear him, it's scientifically impossible, but he folds the letter carefully and puts it in his pocket to be placed in his airstream with his other precious items and he says, quietly, "I won't let you down, Evans." 

***

If you'd asked Michael what was playing at the drive-in on Thursday night he couldn't tell you. He'd sat watching the movie with the tailgate of his truck down but he hadn't been paying any attention to it. Instead, he's been watching the way Alex's lips curled up in the corners when he smiled. How that smile makes his eyes light up and crease in the edges. How that smile makes him look ten years younger (though admittedly, the longer hair helps). 

He's been watching the way Alex laughs, less restrained than he has been for years and how the sound echoes in him like Alex's voice is a choir song in the Sistine Chapel of Michael's ribcage. Fuck, he's been spending too much time with Max.

When it's over and they're packing up, Michael helps Isobel collapse the projector because Noah's not here anymore and Max is still recovering, too weak to do anything more than sass them from wherever they leave him for long periods of time. It's as annoying as it is endearing and Michael wouldn't change it for the world.

"I'm happy," Isobel says, nudging him lightly as she catches him looking back at Alex, who's helping litter pick while he waits for Michael to finish up.

"Mm?"

Isobel bumps his shoulder again and gives him a look that says  _ really? _ as much as it says anything else. Michael just grins and her and wraps an arm around her shoulders, tugging her in close and pressing a kiss to her temple. She folds into him, slotting her arms around his waist and head underneath his chin.

"Thanks, Iz." 

They stay like that for a minute or two before she's called away to handle some kind of dispute which lets Michael box up the projector fully and efficiently without using his powers to cheat. He doesn't need to anymore; the healing seems to have finally taken effect and with the exercises Valenti gave him to help strengthen atrophied muscles, his hand is as good as new.

He knows, because he remembers that faith healer Arizona told him, that the pain finally being gone is down to repairing things with Alex. Healing that first wound. Letting himself feel  _ whole _ .

He glances up in time to see Maria with her arms locked tightly around Alex's shoulders. She leans back and they have a brief conversation, but Michael can't hear it from this distance and doesn't want to. They've all been repairing their relationships, bit by bit, and Michael's been careful to invest in everyone. And everyone has been careful to do the same.

He swallows, pushes his fingers through his hair and, as Maria walks away, heads over. He opens his mouth to ask if everything was okay when Alex closes the tailgate. The driver's side door's open.

"Hey, Guerin?" 

"Yeah?" Michael answers Alex's little grin one of his own, head tipped slightly. He catches the keys that are thrown to him out of instinct, closing his fingers around them.

"You wanna go for a ride?"

  


* * *

**Epilogue**

He winces in the desert sun. It's bright and he's woken up in what, at first glance, looks like the middle of nowhere. 

On second glance, with an immediate reduction in the swelling panic, he realises he's just outside of town. Roswell looks the same as it always has as he walks closer, feeling the soft cut of his jeans against his thighs and the brush of a shirt that isn't from Goodwill against his chest.

He's home.

It hurts, and he can't ignore the way that every part of him aches for the loss that's been sharply rekindled in his chest but it's okay; Michael's home where he belongs and he's more than at peace with that.

Mikey Evans reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a smaller version of the machine that Michael had in his bunker. It fits in the palm of his hand, the small console glowing aquamarine and pulsing with that same cerulean light as before. Good, he thinks as he breathes out a sigh of relief, it's still working.

Straightening his shoulders and starting the short walk into town, Mikey smiles.

Time to make things right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew! Okay, we're done! 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who joined me on this crazy ride, to mandsangelfox, beamirang, insidiousintent, el-giliath, notsodarling and everyone else who's held my hand, shouted and screamed at me to make things better (or worse, as the case may be), who's listened to me whine and complain and moan and threaten to delete the entire story. And thank you to everyone who's read, commented, kudos'd and joined me on this journey. I love you all <3


End file.
